General Counsel

Job description

WHO WE ARE Odyssey https://odyssey.ml is an AI lab pioneering general world models: causal, multimodal systems that learn to predict and interact with the world over long horizons. This foundational technology promises to revolutionize robotics, science, healthcare, education, gaming, defense, and beyond. Odyssey’s founders previously pioneered the most complex application of physical AI: self-driving cars. They’ve now brought together a world-class research team from DeepMind, Tesla, Waymo, Meta, Apple, and Wayve, who have made significant contributions to language models (DeepMind Gemini), video models (DeepMind Veo), world models (Wayve GAIA), and autonomous systems (Tesla FSD). Odyssey has raised significant venture capital from GV, Amazon, AMD, EQT, NVIDIA, Natural Capital, In-Q-Tel, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Guillermo Rauch, Garry Tan, Kyle Vogt, and researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, MSL, Recursive, and Thinking Machines. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR Odyssey is building general-purpose world models, causal, interactive, real-time simulations, and we're hiring our first in-house legal lead. As our first in-house General Counsel, you'll take on the full legal surface and build the legal function from the ground up, operating at the bleeding edge of AI. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own Odyssey's entire legal surface as the first internal counsel. Corporate, commercial, employment, IP, data/privacy, and regulatory. - Serve as the legal partner on compute and infrastructure deals, structuring and negotiating multi-cloud, and hyperscaler commitments alongside finance and leadership. - Drive commercial, customer/enterprise, vendor, and partnership contracts at speed, building templates and playbooks so legal scales with the company. - Manage employment, corporate, governance, and entity matters across the US, UK, and Switzerland, and support financing and board work. - Decide what stays in-house versus external counsel, managing vendors to cut cost and turnaround times. - Stand up the processes, tooling, and knowledge base for a legal function built from scratch. - Ensure US employment compliance: payroll, leave laws, state registrations, I-9s, required trainings, and audits. WHO YOU ARE - A generalist with deep subject-matter expertise in bleeding-edge technology: AI, autonomous vehicles, robotics, or AI infrastructure / deep tech. - Supported complex R&D partnership with long negotiation timelines, interfacing with the technical and commercial stakeholders with competence. - Experienced with the mechanics of compute, infrastructure, or complex commercial deals (direct experience or close exposure). - From a top-tier firm or in-house at a frontier/deep-tech company. In-house experience is not required, subject-matter expertise is. - International in outlook, with cross-border legal experience. - A 0→1 builder with high agency and clock speed who works as an advising authority alongside the leadership team.