Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Counsel, Corporate role is notable in the SaaS landscape because it sits at the intersection of product-led technology and complex corporate transactions. In many SaaS businesses, M&A and strategic investments are not occasional events but recurring tools for expanding product scope, acquiring capabilities, and entering new markets. A counsel who can guide deal structure and execution becomes a central operator in how a software company evolves.
From a SaaS career perspective, the work builds durable fluency in transaction cycles that frequently shape leading subscription businesses, including acquisitions, joint ventures, infrastructure financings, and post-close integration support. The cross-functional partnering described with corporate development, finance, product, research, and people functions also reflects how SaaS companies run deals in practice, with legal translating business objectives into executable terms and governance.
This role tends to fit an experienced transactional lawyer who prefers broad ownership across multiple deal types and is comfortable advising stakeholders with different incentives and timelines. It also suits someone who values ambiguous problem spaces where legal judgment, risk calibration, and practical execution matter as much as drafting precision.
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 and supporting OpenAI’s growth. If you're passionate about doing significant and unique work, this team is for you. The team comprises professionals from diverse fields, including technology, AI, privacy, IP, corporate, employment, tax law, regulatory, and litigation.
About the Role
As a Senior Corporate Counsel, M&A, you will support and lead mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, investments, warrants, infrastructure financings and other corporate transactions through the full lifecycle and provide strategic advice to the business on a broad range of transactional matters. This is a unique opportunity to be directly involved in the forefront of the legal and technology field. This role will work closely with our Corporate Development, Finance, Product & Research, People, and other teams and report to our Deputy General Counsel, M&A, Investments and Strategic Transactions.
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:
Lead and support mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, investments, partnerships and other strategic transactions through the full lifecycle, including opportunity assessment, deal structuring, negotiation, due diligence, and execution
Draft, review, and negotiate transaction documents, including definitive agreements, letters of intent, and ancillary documents.
Provide strategic advice to the corporate development team, senior management and other internal stakeholders regarding transactions and M&A strategy and deal execution.
Work collaboratively with multiple cross-functional teams across the company, including on post-transaction and integration matters.
Support the corporate legal team on a broad range of corporate matters, including financings, liquidity events, corporate governance and international expansion.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have 8+ years of combined, transactional-focused legal experience with fast-paced technology companies and law firms
Have a strong sense of ownership, are inquisitive and enthusiastic about technology, enjoy being continually challenged, and can demonstrate sound judgment in ambiguous situations.
Have a JD and license or qualification to practice in CA
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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