Deal Operations Lead

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA (On-site)
Schedule: Full-time
Salary: $100K–$200K

Company:
Our client is a Y Combinator-backed company building infrastructure to create reinforcement-learning training data and evaluations for frontier AI agents, along with a marketplace connecting this work with frontier labs. Its platform is used by frontier labs, Fortune 500 companies, and startups.

Description:
Our client is seeking a Deal Operations Lead to build and run the commercial infrastructure behind how the company licenses and sells reinforcement-learning environments and manages partnerships.

You will own deals from structuring through contracting and execution, working with buyers and vendors on agreements, building templates and commercial processes that enable speed, and ensuring unusual terms receive the appropriate internal or external review.

The rate of new buyers and sellers is accelerating, and contract negotiation and agreement drafting are delaying deals. This role will increase throughput without lowering the quality of legal judgment.

The mandate sits between senior deal operations and a fractional-general-counsel-style operating role. It is substantially more legal and contract-intensive than conventional deal operations and is not a procurement role. The company is open to different backgrounds, including unusually contract-fluent commercial operators and transactional lawyers who have moved into operating roles.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own commercial contracting across buyers, data vendors, and other partners, including master service agreements (MSAs), statements of work (SOWs), data licenses, service-level agreements (SLAs), nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), vendor agreements, and bespoke arrangements
• Draft, review, and negotiate agreements directly with counterparties, resolving standard issues independently and escalating novel or high-risk legal questions to outside counsel
• Build and continuously improve templates, negotiation playbooks, approval thresholds, fallback positions, and systems that turn recurring deal patterns into fast, repeatable workflows
• Own the operational side of complex deals from initial structure through signature and build lightweight systems that keep contracting from becoming a bottleneck
• Partner with finance and accounting so non-standard structures, payment terms, and contract language can be invoiced and recognized appropriately
• Establish clear rules for what can be standardized or automated, what requires human judgment, and what should be escalated

Qualifications:

Core Experience:

• Experience owning commercial transactions at a fast-growing enterprise technology company through deal operations, business operations, commercial legal work, or a combination
• Strong experience drafting, reviewing, and negotiating technology or commercial agreements
• Judgment to distinguish routine negotiation from issues requiring outside counsel
• Experience working across sales, finance, operations, and legal to move complex deals from structure through signature
• High agency and comfort operating without a playbook, with the ability to handle today's one-off transaction while building the system that makes it routine tomorrow
• Excellent written communication, attention to detail, and confidence pushing back constructively on sophisticated counterparties and internal stakeholders

Preferred:

• Experience with data licensing, IP-intensive transactions, marketplaces, or other businesses where usage and commercialization rights are central to the product
• Legal training or meaningful commercial and transactional-law experience, including former lawyers who moved into operating roles or operators who developed unusually deep contracting expertise
• Experience applying AI and automation to legal or deal workflows while preserving human review for contract terms and legal judgment
• Early-stage startup experience and the ability to work independently in a fast-paced environment

Why Join Them?

• Own the commercial infrastructure supporting reinforcement-learning environment licensing, sales, and partnerships
• Address an immediate contracting backlog while building the templates, playbooks, and systems that support repeatable deal execution
• Work across sales, finance, operations, and legal on complex commercial transactions
• Relocation and visa support are available for strong candidates