Sr. Commercial Counsel

Your role
As a Sr. Commercial Counsel, you will serve as a key legal advisor and deal architect for Dialpad's most complex and high-value commercial transactions. You will handle end-to-end negotiation of strategic agreements, provide authoritative guidance on legal risk, and act as a trusted partner to senior business stakeholders across Sales, Finance, Privacy, Security, and Customer Success. You will bring seasoned judgment and independent decision-making to drive deals forward while protecting the company's interests in a fast-moving, global SaaS environment. 

Beyond day-to-day deal work, you will play a key role in helping to shape the commercial legal function itself - building scalable playbooks, embedding AI-powered workflows, mentoring junior counsel, and helping define how the team operates at scale. You will bring an `AI-first` mindset to this work, translating legal expertise into repeatable, technology-enabled systems that improve speed, consistency, and risk management across the organization. 

This position reports to the Deputy General Counsel and has the opportunity to be based in our Austin Office. 

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.