Commercial Counsel

Job description

About the Job: 👋 I’m Kelly https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-fish-52116924/, Senior Legal Counsel at Ashby. I joined Ashby recently as our first dedicated legal hire and I’m now building the legal team to support our next phase of growth. After 12 years building and scaling in-house legal teams, I was drawn to Ashby for its ambition, product vision, and the exceptional talent across the company. Working alongside smart, low-ego, high-ownership operators every day is energizing and inspires you to bring your best ideas forward. The leadership team is decisive and thoughtful, making intentional choices that balance speed, customer focus, and long-term growth. This is our first commercial counsel hire, and depending on the caliber of the candidates we meet, we may bring on more than one. You would join as a founding member of the commercial arm of our legal team at an exciting inflection point: revenue is outpacing plan, deal volume and size are growing, and our global footprint is expanding, bringing more sophisticated enterprise customers, new regulations, and deeper cross-functional complexity. The role is hands-on and execution-focused, primarily focused on sales commercial contracting, with a meaningful procurement blend. At the core of this opportunity is building best-in-class, in-house support for our sales contracting and the foundations that let it scale as we grow. You will be in commercial contracts every day, partnering closely with Sales to close deals and drive revenue, while building the scalable processes and playbooks that unblock commercial negotiations and focus on operational efficiency. Commercial contracting is the heart of this role and where we need your focus and passion to ramp quickly and make the impact needed. For someone who excels at that core, and as our bandwidth and reach grow, there will be room to get involved in broader initiatives across the legal function and cross-functionally, based on where you show genuine passion and aptitude. Strong candidates will bring demonstrable commercial contracting experience with a heavy focus on sales and GTM, and be equally comfortable in vendor and procurement work. You have succeeded in a lean, scaling legal team, and you pair sound judgment and business acumen with the ownership and soft skills to proactively bring ideas and drive solutions through to implementation. You earn trust through responsiveness, clarity, and pragmatism, advocate firmly and thoughtfully with customers and internal stakeholders alike, and protect key risk positions while keeping negotiations constructive. If you are energized by growth, low-ego, excited to work alongside exceptional talent, and motivated by the chance to shape and scale a high-impact commercial function from the ground up, I would love to meet you. Responsibilities - Be the go-to reviewer for all things commercial contracting, with a primary focus on sales and a strong secondary focus on procurement, plus other opportunities such as partnerships and cross-functional work. - On the sales side, be an early, high-impact part of establishing full suite in-house sales support. - Review, draft, and negotiate customer NDAs, MSAs, Order Forms, and DPAs with a focus on speed, commercial pragmatism, and scalability. - Develop best-in-class sales enablement, internal guidance, and external collateral. - Build efficient processes and smart workflows that make commercial contracting scalable, including playbooks, cross-functional enablement, and new SOPs and workflows across a wide variety of repeatable tasks, partnering with our Legal Ops Manager where appropriate. - Be a responsive, reliable partner to the sales team and other internal stakeholders, someone they want to work with, not around. - On the procurement side, manage a steady flow and wide variety of procurement and vendor requests, reviewing and negotiating contracts in partnership with business owners to keep marketing, events, and tooling moving quickly and to meet turnaround expectations, while iterating on our procurement process as we grow. - Partner closely with security, IT, and product to ensure prospect and customer questionnaires are answered accurately and promptly, and to build scalable solutions. - Help shape and improve legal operations, including the workflows, technology, and tools relevant to contract work such as CLM and CPQ. You should be excited about what AI and new tools bring to the practice of law, with proven experience driving adoption internally. - Identify and get involved in other areas as our legal team's bandwidth grows, bringing clarity, insight, and an ownership mentality to everything you touch. - Exercise solid judgment and business acumen, including knowing how to balance ownership with flagging issues and escalating appropriately, and knowing when to pull me in. Qualifications - JD from an accredited law school and active license to practice law in the US (or equivalent qualification in a relevant jurisdiction). - 6-8 years of legal experience,with at least 4 years in-house experience at a start-up or a company going through a significant period of growth, ideally as an early hire. - Experience at a Saas or high-growth tech company, familiar with SaaS business models and SaaS contract terms. - Demonstrable experience in commercial contract negotiation (customer-side and vendor-side) contributing directly to strong growth. - Excellent interpersonal skills; you genuinely enjoy working with sales teams and and other cross-function partners, and are adept at build trusted relationships. - Good judgment and ability to balance legal risk with business objectives. - Exceptional written communication: able to explain legal concepts, net-new processes, and internal communications in plain, precise language and develop playbooks and GTM-facing enablement materials. We hold a high bar for written communication across the company, and expect legal to set the example for precise, thoughtful writing, including on strategic and net-new projects. - You pride yourself on being organized and able to manage multiple deals and priorities simultaneously, keeping the transactional day-to-day turning while carving out time for builder projects. Bonus: - Experience collaborating with a legal operations function. This role offers a rare opportunity to partner, early in the team's growth, with an accomplished Legal Ops Manager on process and tooling. - Exposure and strong familiarity with AI regulations and with privacy and data protection frameworks (DPAs, GDPR, CCPA). - Experience building or scaling contract operations, including implementing legal tech tools. You should apply if: - You come in with energy and a can-do attitude, you know what it takes to succeed in a fast-paced, high-growth environment, and you have the hard and soft skills to ramp and add value quickly. - You love working with sales and thrive as a cross-functional partner rather than a gatekeeper, building trusted relationships with GTM leadership and across our teams and 4,500+ customers. - You are a solutions-oriented closer: you pair commercial, clear advice with strong operational follow-through, and you ruthlessly prioritize and drive improvements to completion. - You're excited to build the commercial function's foundations as an early hire, comfortable with ambiguity and eager to shape the processes we're still creating on a small but high-impact team. - You bring a low-ego, low-drama, high-ownership approach and welcome regular feedback. - You know how to hold the line, pushing back on customers and internal stakeholders professionally while keeping the relationship positive. - You're energized by what AI and new tools can do for legal workflows, and you've put them into practice before. Why you shouldn’t apply: - You do your best work in large, established teams with mature playbooks and processes already in place. Much of this role is 0-to-1: we're building those now and need someone who brings ideas and helps shape them, not someone who waits to be told what to do. - You lean heavily on meetings or calls to move work forward. We're async-first with a high bar for written communication, so much of your work, decisions, and influence will happen in writing. - You're uncomfortable with change or regular feedback. Thriving amid change, accepting feedback as a way to be even more exceptional, and bringing a positive, low-ego, low-drama attitude are key here. - You find frequent internal outreach or shifting daily priorities frustrating. This role sits at the center of deal flow where context switching is part of the job. - You prefer to advise and manage rather than execute. This role requires doing the day-to-day work as well as building and strategizing. - You are hesitant about using technology to introduce speed, innovation, and efficiency into legal processes. - You prefer an in-office environment. This is a remote role best suited to self-starters. About Ashby We're building the next generation of enterprise software and we're starting with a suite of products that empower talent leaders, recruiters, and hiring managers to be a driving force for revenue & efficiency via a holistic, data-centric talent strategy. We are backed by great investors, including Alkeon, Lachy Groom, Y Combinator and Elad Gil. We have over 4,500+ amazing customers including Snowflake, OpenAI, Shopify, Ramp, Notion, and Zapier (and many others who we cannot name!) and the Ashby team has 350+ people globally. Our growth and retention metrics are best-in-class among our peers: we have tens of millions in ARR, growing >100% year over year, very low churn, very high product velocity and many years of runway. We'll share more details once we meet, but you now probably have a good idea as to why we're hiring for this role 😅. Interview Process Our interview process is thorough - we assess if you are the right fit for Ashby and we will provide ample information for you to determine if Ashby is the right place for you. The process for this role is as follows: - Recruiter Screen with Michelle - 30min - Hiring Manager Interview with our Ashby's Senior Legal Counsel, Kelly - 45min - Practical Assessment - Final Round - 2 to 2.5 hours of 30 minute interviews with cross-functional partners Benefits: - Competitive salary and equity. - 10-year exercise window for stock options. You shouldn’t feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave Ashby —do it when you feel financially comfortable. - Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year. Expect “Vacation?” in our one-on-one agenda until you start taking it 😅. - Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US. We plan to expand this to employees in other countries as situations arise. - Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. Get what you need to be happy and productive! - $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval. - If you’re in the US, top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents with all premiums covered by us. Ashby’s success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. We’re being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough to apply. Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities. Ashby is committed to a fair and transparent hiring process. We confirm that this advertisement is for an active, existing vacancy within our organization. Please be advised that we may use artificial intelligence-driven tools to assist our recruitment team in screening, assessing, and selecting candidates for this position.