Legal Operations Lead

About HUD

HUD is building infrastructure to create RL training data and evals for frontier AI agents, as well as a marketplace to sell these to frontier labs through the HUD marketplace. Our platform is used by frontier labs, Fortune 500 companies, and startups. We’ve raised $16M from top VCs and were YC W25.

About the role

We’re looking for a Legal Operations Lead to build and own the systems, processes, and commercial frameworks enable HUD to move more quickly as our volume and complexity of agreements grows.

This is not a traditional in-house counsel role. We’re looking for someone who combines strong legal and contracting judgment with an operator’s instinct for systems, tooling, and leverage. You should be comfortable handling a contract directly one day and redesigning the process so it barely needs manual intervention the next.

Responsibilities

• Own day-to-day legal operations - drafting and negotiating SOWs, chasing signatures, and monitoring timelines for invoicing will be 25-50% of your time

• Draft, review, and negotiate routine commercial agreements across buyers, data vendors, and other partners, including MSAs, SOWs, data licenses, SLAs, NDAs, vendor agreements, and other bespoke arrangements

• Build and continuously improve templates and negotiation playbooks so recurring issues such as data rights and usage restrictions can be handled quickly and consistently

• Identify opportunities to automate or streamline high-volume legal workflows using software and AI, while preserving appropriate human review for judgment-heavy issues

• Establish clear rules for what should be handled internally, what can be standardized or automated, and what should be escalated to founders or outside counsel

• Manage outside counsel strategically, including scoping work, preparing issues efficiently, controlling legal spend, and ensuring external lawyers are used primarily for high-value or specialist questions

Experience

You may be a good fit if you have:

• Experience in legal operations, contracts management, commercial operations, transactional legal work, business operations, or a combination of these at a fast-growing technology company

• Strong experience drafting, reviewing, and negotiating commercial technology agreements, with the judgment to distinguish routine issues from matters that require specialist legal advice

• Comfort working with legal technology, workflow tools, and AI, and an interest in using them to make legal work materially faster and more scalable

• Strong commercial judgment and the ability to balance legal risk against speed, customer needs, and business priorities

• Excellent written communication, attention to detail, and the confidence to push back constructively on sophisticated customers, vendors, and internal stakeholders

Strong candidates may also have:

• Legal training, including experience at a law firm or in-house legal team, but prefer operating and building systems over practicing law as a traditional counsel

• Experience building or scaling legal operations, contract management, or a deal desk from an early stage

• Experience with data licensing, IP-intensive transactions, marketplaces, or other businesses where contractual rights are closely tied to the product

• Experience managing outside counsel

• Early-stage startup experience with ability to work independently in fast-paced environments

We prioritize technical aptitude and learning potential over years of experience. Motivated candidates are encouraged to apply even if they don't meet all criteria.

Team & company details

• Team Size: ~25 people currently, mostly full-time in-person, but some remote.

• Our team: Our team includes 4 International Olympiad medalists (IOI, ILO, IPhO), serial AI startup founders, and researchers with publications at ICLR, NeurIPS, etc.

• Company stage: We have 8 figures in funding and are scaling profitably and quickly to meet very strong demand.

Logistics

• Employment: Full-time.

• Location: San Francisco office only for this role.

• Visa Sponsorship: We provide support for relocation and visas for strong full-time candidates to the US or Singapore.

• Timeline: Applications are rolling. The process is 2 technical interviews and a 2-3 day work trial.

What we offer

• Competitive compensation

• 100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision from Blue Shield of CA (US employees)

• Lunch and dinner when you’re in the office (in-office employees)

• Company-wide holiday break (Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day) on top of PTO and paid holidays

• Other perks including an Equinox membership, 401k, and commuter benefits (US employees)

• Unlimited* access to tokens for ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, etc. *By unlimited, we mean no one on our token usage leaderboard has ever hit a limit. So we have no idea what the limit is.

Due to high volume, we may not actively respond to every application, but feel free to contact us at recruiting@hud.so or elsewhere if we missed your application!