Commercial Counsel

Job description

ABOUT US At LangChain, our mission is to make intelligent agents ubiquitous. We build the foundation for agent engineering in the real world, helping developers move from prototypes to production-ready AI agents that teams can rely on. We began as widely adopted open-source tools and have grown to also offer a platform for building, evaluating, deploying, and operating agents at scale. With $125M raised at Series B from IVP, Sequoia, Benchmark, CapitalG, and Sapphire Ventures, we’re at a stage where we’re continuing to develop new products, growth is accelerating, and all team members have meaningful impact on what we build and how we work together. LangChain is a place where your contributions can shape how this technology shows up in the real world. Today, our platform includes LangSmith (Observability, Evaluation, Deployment, Fleet, and Sandboxes), our open source frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, and Deep Agents), and the newly launched LangSmith Engine for autonomous agent improvement. We have 100M+ monthly open source downloads, 6,000+ active LangSmith customers, and 5 of the Fortune 10 use LangSmith in production (+ 35% of the Fortune 500 overall), including teams at Klarna, Clay, Coinbase, Workday, Lyft, Cloudflare, Harvey, Rippling, Vanta, LinkedIn, Monday.com, Nvidia, and Bridgewater. ABOUT THE ROLE LangChain builds infrastructure that powers AI-native applications. Our open-source framework and commercial products enable developers and enterprises to build, deploy, and scale applications with large language models. We are seeking a business-minded Commercial Counsel to support a broad range of commercial legal work across LangChain’s go-to-market and business operations. In this role, you will draft, review, and negotiate a mix of customer, partner, vendor, and other commercial agreements, helping the business move quickly while thoughtfully managing legal and operational risk. This is a highly cross-functional role for someone who enjoys working close to the business and is excited to support both day-to-day contracting and the systems that make contracting more scalable. You’ll work closely with teams across Sales, Partnerships, Finance, Security, Product, Revenue Operations, and Operations to help structure, negotiate, and execute agreements that support LangChain’s growth. Over time, this role may take on increasing responsibility for LangChain’s partner and alliances work, including technology partnerships, channel relationships, integrations, and strategic go-to-market initiatives. In the near term, the role will support a broader variety of commercial agreements, including vendor contracts, while helping build out the processes and infrastructure needed for scale. You will also play an important role in improving LangChain’s commercial legal operations, including helping design vendor review processes, contracting workflows, templates, playbooks, approval paths, and supporting the implementation of Ironclad. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Draft, review, redline, and negotiate a broad range of commercial agreements, including customer agreements, partner agreements, vendor agreements, NDAs, order forms, MSAs, DPAs, security addenda, amendments, and related commercial documentation. - Support LangChain’s Sales, Partnerships, Finance, Security, Product, Revenue Operations, and Operations teams by providing practical, business-oriented legal guidance. - Review and negotiate commercial agreements efficiently, while identifying when issues require escalation or cross-functional input. - Support enterprise sales deals as needed, including SaaS, cloud, and technology agreements with sophisticated customers. - Support partner and alliance-related agreements, including technology partnerships, referral arrangements, reseller or channel relationships, integration partnerships, marketplace arrangements, co-selling motions, and strategic collaborations. - Review and negotiate vendor agreements and help develop a scalable vendor review process, including intake, risk assessment, approval workflows, fallback positions, and cross-functional review practices. - Partner closely with internal stakeholders to facilitate efficient deal execution while balancing legal, business, security, financial, and operational risk. - Advise on contractual issues related to data protection, privacy, security, intellectual property, AI/LLM usage, confidentiality, indemnities, limitation of liability, compliance, partner programs, integrations, and vendor risk. - Help implement and operationalize Ironclad, including contract intake workflows, approval routing, templates, clause libraries, playbooks, reporting, and process improvements. - Contribute to the development and continuous improvement of contract templates, negotiation guidelines, approval workflows, fallback positions, and scalable contracting processes. - Identify patterns across customer, partner, and vendor negotiations and recommend practical improvements to LangChain’s standard positions, processes, and risk frameworks. - Serve as a trusted legal partner to business stakeholders, helping teams understand tradeoffs and make sound decisions in ambiguous or fast-moving situations. WHAT YOU’LL BRING - 5–8 years of experience drafting, reviewing, and negotiating commercial technology agreements, ideally with a mix of law firm and in-house experience. - In-house experience at a SaaS, infrastructure, AI, cloud, developer tools, enterprise software, or high-growth technology company strongly preferred. - Experience with a broad mix of commercial agreements, including customer agreements, vendor agreements, partner agreements, NDAs, MSAs, order forms, DPAs, security addenda, amendments, and related documentation. - Experience supporting partnerships, alliances, channel, reseller, marketplace, referral, integration, co-sell, or other ecosystem-driven commercial arrangements. - Strong foundation in SaaS, cloud, or technology contracting, including familiarity with data privacy, security, intellectual property, confidentiality, indemnity, limitation of liability, AI/LLM usage, and compliance issues in a B2B technology environment. - Comfort managing a steady volume of agreements of varying complexity, from routine vendor or commercial contracts to more strategic partner or customer transactions. - Ability to independently manage negotiations while knowing when to escalate novel, complex, or higher-risk issues. - Experience helping build or improve legal processes, contracting workflows, approval paths, templates, playbooks, vendor review processes, or other legal operations infrastructure. - Experience with Ironclad or another contract lifecycle management platform is a plus. - Strong business judgment and the ability to balance legal risk with commercial objectives in a fast-paced, high-growth environment. - Excellent communication skills and comfort advising non-legal stakeholders across Sales, Partnerships, Product, Security, Finance, Revenue Operations, and Operations. - Highly organized, responsive, and able to manage multiple priorities with strong attention to detail. - Low-ego, collaborative, and excited to help build scalable legal processes for a growing company. - Admitted to practice law in the applicable jurisdiction; California admission preferred, or ability to register as in-house counsel in California. Compensation range: 150K - 215K + equity Compensation Philosophy: We offer competitive compensation that includes base salary, variable compensation for relevant roles, meaningful equity, benefits, and perks. Actual compensation and offerings will vary based on role, level, and location. Team members in the EU, UK, and APAC receive locally competitive benefits aligned with regional norms and regulations. BENEFITS Benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage, flexible vacation, a 401(k) plan, meals on in-office days in the US and more.