Sr. Commercial Counsel

What you’ll do

Contract Management & Negotiation

• Handle end-to-end negotiation of Dialpad's most significant and complex commercial agreements, including enterprise SaaS agreements, strategic partnership arrangements, reseller and channel agreements, services agreements, and vendor contracts, with minimal supervision.
• Serve as a key point of contact and legal decision-maker for enterprise and strategic accounts, managing deal escalations with sound, risk-calibrated judgment.
• Draft and redline sophisticated contract language across a wide range of commercial terms, including limitations of liability, indemnification, IP ownership, data processing, SLAs, and audit rights.
• Identify, articulate, and resolve complex legal issues with practical, business-oriented recommendations that balance legal risk against commercial objectives.
• Work with outside counsel on real estate leases for Dialpad global offices.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Act as a strategic advisor to senior business stakeholders including Sales leadership, Finance, and Customer Success, influencing deal structure and go-to-market strategy from the earliest stages of customer engagement.
• Collaborate with Privacy, Security, and Compliance teams on sophisticated contractual issues, including GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, HIPAA, and sector-specific regulatory requirements.
• Support RFP responses and security questionnaires on complex legal, compliance, and contractual matters requiring senior-level judgment.
• Partner with Customer Success leadership to resolve high-stakes customer escalations and disputes in a constructive, relationship-preserving manner.

Legal Operations & Scalability

• Develop and continuously refine the commercial legal playbook, including pre-approved fallback positions, escalation protocols, and guidance on non-standard terms.
• Undertake the design and implementation of AI-powered contracting workflows - including first-pass contract review, clause extraction, risk scoring, and legal research - and set standards for how AI tools are used responsibly within the commercial legal function.
• Mentor and provide day-to-day guidance to junior commercial counsel and legal operations team members, helping build their commercial judgment and drafting skills.
• Design and deliver continuing legal education and training programs for Sales and other business partners on key commercial legal concepts, playbook positions, and process adherence.
• Drive process improvement initiatives that shorten contract cycle times, reduce friction for business teams, and enable greater self-service on standard transactions.

Skills you’ll bring

• 8-15 years of experience as a commercial attorney, with substantial in-house experience at a technology or SaaS company; prior law firm experience is a plus.
• Demonstrated track record of independently leading complex, high-value commercial negotiations with enterprise customers, strategic partners, and vendors.
• Deep substantive expertise in SaaS and technology contract frameworks, including software licensing, professional services, data processing agreements, and cloud/platform agreements.
• Sophisticated understanding of data privacy and security obligations relevant to commercial contracting, including GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, HIPAA, and cross-border data transfer requirements.
• Proven ability to provide clear, confident legal guidance to senior business stakeholders, including C-suite and VP-level executives, and to influence outcomes without over-lawyering.
• Experience building and scaling commercial legal infrastructure, including playbooks, templates, approval workflows, and training programs.
• Hands-on experience with AI-powered legal tools and a genuine interest in driving their adoption- including evaluating tools critically, designing prompts and workflows, and establishing governance standards for AI use in legal work.
• Strong mentorship skills and experience supporting the professional development of junior attorneys or legal operations staff.
• Fluent in spoken and written English.