Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Counsel, Litigation (Safety) role stands out in the SaaS ecosystem because it sits at the intersection of product deployment and regulatory exposure—an area that has become central for AI-driven software companies operating at global scale. The remit signals a legal function that is tightly coupled to how a modern SaaS platform handles user impact, content disputes, product liability theories, and evolving expectations around model behavior.
For SaaS legal careers, the role offers durable leverage: litigation and regulatory work that connects directly to operational decision-making across communications, policy, and executive leadership. Experience managing outside counsel, shaping strategy under uncertainty, and translating legal risk into practical guidance tends to transfer across SaaS categories where platform governance, trust, and safety are strategic concerns rather than back-office issues.
This position is best suited to a senior practitioner who prefers cross-functional influence over narrow subject-matter ownership, and who is comfortable operating where precedent is limited and stakeholder alignment matters as much as legal analysis. It will likely appeal to counsel motivated by complex disputes that touch product design, user harm considerations, and public-facing scrutiny common to scaled SaaS platforms.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
OpenAI's Legal team plays a crucial role in furthering OpenAI's mission by tackling innovative, fundamental legal issues in AI. If you're passionate about doing significant and unique work as a technology lawyer, this team is for you. The team comprises legal professionals from diverse fields, including technology, privacy, IP, corporate, cybersecurity, employment, tax, regulatory, and litigation.
About the Role
We’re growing our world-class Litigation and Regulatory team and seek an experienced counsel to support litigation matters related to our business. This role is highly cross-functional across OpenAI, including work across our Legal, Communications, Global Affairs, and Executive teams. This role reports to our Associate General Counsel.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Provide legal advice and counsel on a wide range of global litigation matters, including commercial disputes, products liability cases, content moderation disputes, model output liability, and intellectual property litigation.
Manage and oversee outside counsel in all aspects of litigation and regulatory matters, including discovery, motion practice, trial preparation, and settlement negotiations.
Stay current on relevant laws, regulations, and industry trends, and provide updates and legal guidance to company leadership and stakeholders.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams to gather relevant information, assess risk, and develop legal strategies to resolve disputes.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have at least 10+ years of combined litigation experience at innovative technology companies and law firms.
Have a JD and license or qualification to practice in CA.
Have a strong sense of ownership, are inquisitive and enthusiastic about technology, enjoy being continually challenged, and can demonstrate sound judgment in ambiguous situations.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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