# Founding General Counsel

**Company:** [Starbridge](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/starbridge)
**Location:** New York, NY
**Role:** Legal
**Salary:** $250k – $400k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** government contracts, sled procurement, far, dfars, saas agreements, channel agreements, ip negotiation, Data Privacy, Cybersecurity, ai governance
**Posted:** 2026-07-29

> Founding General Counsel to build legal, contracts, and public sector compliance from scratch at a fast-growing public sector VAR and SaaS platform. Negotiate complex multi-party government technology deals, own core agreements, design deal desk and compliance systems, and embed legal logic into product.

## Job Description

## What You'll Do
- Design the legal architecture for a four-party channel — OEM, Starbridge, vehicle holder or distributor, and government buyer — including privity, payment flow, liability, reporting, and audit responsibility.
- Own the core paper: OEM authorization and distribution agreements, reseller and referral agreements, public sector order forms and addenda, EULA riders, DPAs and security terms, and enterprise SaaS agreements.
- Build the government contracts operating system for federal and SLED transactions: vehicle eligibility, flow-downs, representations and certifications, pricing and transaction reporting, renewals, records, and audit readiness.
- Stand up a fast, trusted deal desk — templates, clause libraries, approval thresholds, fallback positions, and service levels that sales and finance actually use.
- Protect Starbridge's economics across the chain: discounts, fees, markups, renewals, refunds, non-appropriation, credit, tax, insurance, and indemnity.
- Treat legal as product: work with engineering to encode vehicle rules, required terms, approvals, and compliance evidence into the Starbridge platform.
- Advise company-wide on commercial contracts, privacy and AI, cybersecurity, IP, employment, and governance, with specialists on call.

## Qualifications
- Roughly 7–12 years of highly relevant legal experience (exceptional candidates outside that range are welcome).
- You've personally handled multi-party public sector technology transactions involving some combination of OEMs, distributors, resellers, contract vehicles, and government customers.
- Real depth in SLED procurement, enough grounding to understand how federal differs, and the learning speed to cover the rest quickly.
- You negotiate commercial SaaS, channel, data, security, and IP terms as comfortably as government clauses.
- You draft, redline, join the call, make the judgment, and give teams an executable path — not a memo explaining why the answer is complicated.
- You're intellectually honest about what you don't know, frame outside counsel questions tightly, and never pay a firm to relearn our business.
- You're hungry for ownership, excited by a blank page, and eager to use AI to eliminate repetitive legal work.

## Bonus If You Have
- Experience in the public sector channel: distributor or reseller plus OEM software, or scaled OEM managing channel.
- Experience with pricing disclosures, transaction reporting, FAR and DFARS flow-downs, and False Claims Act controls.
- Exposure to high-volume distribution economics: payments, credit, collections, insurance, and channel conflict.

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