Product Counsel

Job description

Beacon is building the essential technology infrastructure for the everyday economy: the businesses, organizations, and services that make real life work, and that mainstream tech has largely left behind. We acquire, operate, and grow vertical market software and services companies: niche, founder-built businesses serving industries that are too specific for the enterprise giants and too profitable to ignore. Our model is simple. We buy great businesses, invest in their continued growth, and hold them permanently. We are not a financial firm. We are technology entrepreneurs and operators who believe the most important businesses in the world are already running quietly in industries most people never think about. Our job is to find them, support the people who built them, and make them better. We seek out founders who have built their business by spending years understanding their market and prioritizing their customers' specific needs. Our flexible structure offers entrepreneurs a unique option to implement a transition that ensures the continuity of the company while receiving liquidity at full value for their equity in their business. No mandate to cut, flip, or roll up into something unrecognizable. We are permanent, committed capital with no exit pressure and a long-term time horizon, backed by a diverse base of investors including Wall Street (D1 Capital, CPMG), Silicon Valley (General Catalyst and Lightspeed), the family offices of world-class technology entrepreneurs (including the founders of Stripe, DoorDash, and Ramp), and evergreen funds built for the long game (Sator Grove). Beacon was founded by Nilam Ganenthiran, entrepreneur, former President of Instacart, and investor at D1 Capital, who has spent his career building, scaling, and backing high-growth technology businesses. ## **About the Role** We are seeking a commercially minded Product Counsel to join Beacon’s legal team as our dedicated product and IP specialist. This is a high-impact role at the intersection of law, technology, and product strategy: you will be the primary legal partner to Beacon and its portfolio’s product and engineering functions — advising on new product features and development across our portfolio in different industries, protecting Beacon’s intellectual property, and managing the full spectrum of product-related legal matters across our growing portfolio of businesses. Reporting to Beacon’s VP, Legal, you will work closely with product managers, engineers, and commercial teams both at Beacon and within portfolio companies to enable fast-moving, innovation-focused product decisions while proactively managing legal risk. You will bring broad regulatory fluency across multiple industries — a genuine asset given the diversity of verticals represented in our portfolio — and will own Beacon’s IP portfolio strategy, open source compliance program, and product-related commercial agreements. As Beacon scales, there is also a meaningful opportunity for the right person to grow this role to encompass broader commercial contracting responsibilities across the platform. This is a role for a lawyer who wants to be embedded in the work, thrives in a fast-paced and high-autonomy environment, and is excited by the prospect of building and shaping their remit over time. ## **What You'll Do** - **Product Legal Partnership — Beacon & Portfolio Companies:** Serve as the embedded legal partner to Beacon’s product and engineering teams, and as a hands-on advisor to the product and engineering teams across Beacon’s portfolio companies. Advise on new product features, roadmap decisions, and go-to-market launches from ideation through release, identifying legal risks early and providing practical, enabling guidance. Build trusted relationships with product managers, engineers, and designers across the platform so that legal input is integrated into the product development process rather than treated as a downstream gate. Develop scalable legal support models that allow portfolio company product teams to access consistent, high-quality legal guidance as they build and ship. - **IP Portfolio Strategy & Protection:** Own and manage Beacon’s intellectual property portfolio across the platform and portfolio companies. Develop and execute a proactive IP strategy including patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. Oversee patent prosecution and filing programs, manage trademark registrations globally, and advise on IP ownership, assignment, and licensing matters. Build IP frameworks that protect Beacon’s competitive advantages and the proprietary technology of acquired companies. - **Product & Technology Agreements:** Draft, review, and negotiate a broad range of product-facing commercial agreements, including SaaS and software licensing agreements, API terms and developer agreements, marketplace and platform agreements, technology partnership arrangements, and product integration agreements. Develop and maintain standard-form product agreements, terms of service, and acceptable use policies for Beacon and its portfolio companies. - **Open Source Governance:** Build and manage Beacon’s open source compliance program. Review and advise on the use of open source software across product development, assess license compatibility and obligations (including GPL, LGPL, Apache, MIT, and similar), and establish policies and processes that enable responsible open source use at scale across the portfolio. - **M&A Product & IP Diligence:** Lead and conduct product and IP due diligence on acquisition targets — assessing IP ownership, freedom to operate, patent exposure, open source risks, software licensing obligations, and technology dependency risks. Develop standardized IP diligence checklists and frameworks. Post-close, advise on IP integration, assignment, and consolidation across the portfolio. - **AI & Emerging Technology:** Advise on the legal and IP dimensions of Beacon’s and its portfolio companies’ use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in products. Provide guidance on AI-generated content ownership, training data rights, model licensing, and emerging regulatory frameworks. Help product teams build AI-powered features responsibly, with appropriate legal guardrails. - **Multi-Industry Regulatory Compliance:** Bring broad regulatory fluency to advise on product-related legal requirements across the diverse range of industries represented in Beacon’s portfolio — spanning sectors such as field services, property management, healthcare administration, financial services, and beyond. Advise on sector-specific compliance obligations, platform liability considerations, accessibility requirements, and consumer protection laws as they apply to product features and releases. Partner with the privacy counsel function on product-layer data collection, consent, and data minimization requirements. - **Content & Brand Protection:** Advise on brand protection strategy, trademark enforcement, and content-related legal matters including copyright clearance, user-generated content policies, and DMCA compliance. Manage third-party IP claims and develop enforcement and response procedures for IP disputes. - **Templates, Playbooks & Scalable Legal Infrastructure:** Build a library of reusable product legal templates, standard-form agreements, and internal playbooks that increase speed and consistency as Beacon scales its product and portfolio operations. Leverage AI tools to streamline contract review, legal research, and document drafting. ## **Who You Are** - J.D. from an accredited law school and member in good standing of at least one bar (California or New York preferred). - 5–7 years of product, technology, and IP law experience at a top-tier law firm, or 4–5 years of in-house product and IP counsel experience at a technology company. - Broad product law experience spanning IP strategy and portfolio management, software and SaaS licensing, open source compliance, and product-facing commercial agreements. - Demonstrated ability to work directly with product and engineering teams — both at a corporate level and embedded within individual business units or portfolio companies — as a trusted legal partner. Comfortable operating in agile product environments and translating legal requirements into actionable, developer-friendly guidance. - Broad regulatory experience across multiple industries, with the ability to quickly come up to speed on sector-specific legal frameworks and advise product teams on compliance obligations in verticals outside of mainstream consumer technology. - Experience advising on AI/ML products and familiarity with the evolving legal landscape around training data rights, and AI regulation is a strong plus. - Strong background in patent strategy and prosecution management, trademark portfolio oversight, and IP ownership and licensing structures. - Experience conducting or advising on IP and technology due diligence in M&A transactions, including freedom-to-operate analysis, open source risk assessment, and IP integration planning. - Experience with commercial contracting — including drafting and negotiating MSAs, vendor agreements, and customer-facing terms — is a strong plus, and may expand the scope of this role over time. - Proficiency with AI tools for legal work, and a genuine interest in building efficient, scalable legal workflows for a high-growth, multi-product environment. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical and legal concepts in clear, business-friendly language. - Experience with vertical market software, SaaS, or multi-product technology platforms is a strong plus. **Our Values at Beacon Software** - Humility: We acknowledge that the path to getting to the right answer involves being wrong along the way. We have strong beliefs which are weakly held. We actively seek new ideas and believe we can learn from anyone at any time. - Honesty: We are truth seeking in our approach to business problems. Business is a repeat game and we believe that human relationships generate alpha. We understand that trust is earned over a lifetime and can be lost in an instant. - Hunger: We play to win. We hold ourselves to high standards and will not be outworked. We take pride in having a deep sense of responsibility to ourselves, each other, our partners, and our customers. We believe to whom much is given much is expected. - Horizon: We seek to build a generational software company. This will take decades. We manage our expectations and those of our partners to take advantage of the 8th wonder of the world - compounding growth. ***How We Use AI in Our Hiring Process:** To ensure transparency, we want candidates to know that Beacon Software uses Artificial Intelligence and AI-enabled tools to assist with screening, reviewing, organizing and highlighting profiles and applications that match the key requirements for each role.* ***AI does not make hiring decisions:** Every application is reviewed by a member of our team, and all decisions throughout the process are made by humans. We use AI to support efficiency and consistency, not to replace human judgment. We are committed to a fair, thoughtful, and equitable experience for every candidate.*