Commercial Counsel - San Francisco

About the Job: · I'm Kelly, Senior Legal Counsel at Ashby. I joined Ashby recently as our first dedicated legal hire and I'm now building the legal team to support our next phase of growth. · After 12 years building and scaling in-house legal teams, I was drawn to Ashby for its a ...

Job description

About the Job:

I'm Kelly, Senior Legal Counsel at Ashby. I joined Ashby recently as our first dedicated legal hire and I'm now building the legal team to support our next phase of growth.

After 12 years building and scaling in-house legal teams, I was drawn to Ashby for its ambition, product vision, and the exceptional talent across the company. Working alongside smart, low-ego, high-ownership operators every day is energizing and inspires you to bring your best ideas forward. The leadership team is decisive and thoughtful, making intentional choices that balance speed, customer focus, and long-term growth.

Now is the time to build on the momentum of having a dedicated in-house lawyer and scale this into a truly best-in-class legal function by hiring a Commercial Counsel to join me as the next member of the legal team. Ashby is at a real inflection point - we closed our Series D in June 2025, revenue is outpacing our financial plans, deal volume and deal size are increasing and our global footprint is expanding. With that growth comes more sophisticated enterprise customers, new regulations and deeper cross-functional complexity.

We are hiring for a Commercial Counsel to support proactive, scalable legal partnership with Ashby's go-to-market teams. This is a hands-on, execution-focused role at the center of deal flow. You will be in commercial contracts every day, partnering closely with Sales to help close deals and directly drive revenue. You should also have demonstrated experience in identifying and implementing new legal technologies that allow us to build scalable commercial processes, unblocking customers and enabling the business to grow efficiently

As an early legal hire, you will also have ownership of vendor agreements and negotiations, and have meaningful exposure to broader strategic initiatives across legal operations, global expansion, product, privacy, AI governance, PeopleOps, and anything else you show a passion for.

We are looking for someone with existing in-house commercial contracting experience who thrives in a high-growth environment, builds strong internal relationships quickly, and earns trust through responsiveness and pragmatism. You are comfortable advocating firmly and thoughtfully with both customers and internal stakeholders. You know how to protect key risk positions while keeping negotiations constructive and moving forward. You care about strong execution today and building the right foundations for tomorrow.

If you are energized by growth, excited to work alongside exceptional talent, and motivated by the opportunity to help shape and scale a high-impact legal function from the ground up, I would love to meet you.

Responsibilities

• Review, draft, and negotiate customer NDAs, MSAs, Order Forms, and DPAs with a focus on speed, commercial pragmatism and scalability.

• Be a responsive, reliable partner to the sales team and other internal stakeholders - someone they want to work with, not around.

• Support the scalability of commercial contracting at Ashby through the development of contract playbooks, fallback positions, and developing material to enable our sales team with items such as negotiation guidance.

• Partner closely with security, IT and our product teams to ensure prospect and customer questionnaires are responded to accurately, promptly and develop scalable solutions.

• Review and negotiate vendor agreements in partnership with business owners and relevant cross-functional stakeholders and meet SLAs.

• Own and improve legal operations through new workflows, technology and tools relevant to contract workflows, such as CLM, and CPQ tools, and enabling GTM teams. You should be excited about the opportunities that AI and new tools bring to the legal industry with proven experience driving adoption internally.

• Contribute to other in-house legal work as required including legal operations, employment matters, IP, corporate governance, and drafting both internal guidance materials to enable teams and external publications to educate and engage our customers and community.

• Work with external counsel as required.

• Flag issues and escalate appropriately; know when to pull me in.

Qualifications

• JD from an accredited law school and active license to practice law in the US (or equivalent qualification in relevant jurisdiction).

• 4-6 years of legal experience, ideally combining law firm training with in-house experience at a fast growing company.

• Strong experience in commercial contract negotiation (customer-side and vendor-side) contributing directly to revenue growth.

• Excellent interpersonal skills - you genuinely enjoy working with sales teams and building trusted relationships internally and externally.

• Good judgment and ability to balance legal risk with business objectives.

• Clear, concise communication style - able to explain legal concepts in plain language and develop playbooks and GTM facing enablement materials.

• Organized and able to manage multiple deals and priorities simultaneously.

Bonus:

• Prior experience as an early legal hire in a fast growing SaaS, tech, or AI company.

• Familiarity with SaaS business models and standard SaaS contract terms.

• Exposure and strong familiarity to privacy and data protection frameworks (DPAs, GDPR, CCPA)

• Experience building or scaling contract operations, including implementing legal tech tools.

You should apply if:

• You're excited about contributing to growth. You fundamentally view the role of an in-house legal team as a key contributor and cross-functional partner to fuel Ashby's significant growth, rather than as a gatekeeper.

• You are skilled at building cross-functional relationships. This role will require you to work with Ashby's GTM teams and with any of our 3,700+ customers. Establishing strong relationships, particularly with GTM leadership team members is crucial to the success of this role.

• You love working with sales. You get energy from being their go-to person and take pride in helping them close deals.

• You are solutions-oriented. You provide highly commercial and clear legal advice that clearly considers relevant business context and you have strong operational follow-through.

• You are proactive and can ruthlessly prioritize. You can easily spot areas of improvement across the legal process and operations and can work with cross-functional teams on education and process improvements.

• You're excited to help build the foundations for the legal team at Ashby as an early hire. You want to be part of a small (but growing), high-impact legal team where your work matters every day and you have opportunities for growth.

• You know how to hold the line. You can push back on customers (and internal stakeholders) professionally and effectively while keeping the relationship positive.

• You're comfortable with ambiguity. We're still building processes - you'll help shape them.

• You are excited about the impact that AI and new technology can have on improving legal workflows - you've experimented and implemented new legal tech tools and workflows and are excited to execute on improving legal operations at Ashby.

Why you shouldn't apply:

• You prefer highly structured environments with established playbooks already in place. We're building those now - and you'll help shape them - but if you need that structure from day one, this isn't the right fit.

• You want to focus on complex, bespoke transactions rather than volume contract work where speed and consistency matter.

• You find frequent internal outreach or shifting daily priorities frustrating. This role sits at the center of deal flow where context switching is part of the job.

• You're not comfortable working directly with sales teams and business stakeholders. This role is deeply embedded with sales.

• You prefer to advise rather than execute. This role requires rolling up your sleeves and doing the work, not just flagging issues.

• You are hesitant about using technologies to introduce speed, innovation and efficiency into legal processes.

• You prefer an in-office environment. This is a remote role and is best-suited for self-starters who excel in an independent setting.

• You're uncomfortable with change. We are a rapidly growing team and company, and the ability to stay flexible and thrive amid change is key to success here.

About Ashby

We're building the next generation of enterprise software and we're starting with a suite of products that empower talent leaders, recruiters, and hiring managers to be a driving force for revenue & efficiency via a holistic, data-centric talent strategy.

We just raised our series D bringing our total funding to $120m and are backed by great investors, including Alkeon, Lachy Groom Y Combinator and Elad Gil. We have over 2,700+ amazing customers including Snowflake, OpenAI, Shopify, Ramp, Notion, and Zapier (and many others who we cannot name) and the Ashby team has 220+ people globally.

Our growth and retention metrics are best-in-class among our peers: we have tens of millions in ARR, growing >100% year over year, very low churn, very high product velocity and many years of runway. We'll share more details once we meet, but you now probably have a good idea as to why we're hiring for this role .

Interview Process

Our interview process is thorough - we assess if you are the right fit for Ashby and we will provide ample information for you to determine if Ashby is the right place for you. The process for this role is as follows:

• Recruiter Screen with Michelle - 30min

• Hiring Manager Interview with our Ashby's Senior Legal Counsel, Kelly - 45min

• Practical Assessment

• Final Round - 2 to 2.5 hours of 30 minute interviews with cross-functional partners

Benefits:

• Competitive salary and equity.

• 10-year exercise window for stock options. You shouldn't feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave Ashby —do it when you feel financially comfortable.

• Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year. Expect "Vacation?" in our one-on-one agenda until you start taking it .

• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US. We plan to expand this to employees in other countries as situations arise.

• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. Get what you need to be happy and productive

• $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.

• If you're in the US, top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents with all premiums covered by us.

Ashby's success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. We're being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough to apply.

Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.