Associate Director/Director, Frontier and AI Product Counsel
lilasciences
4 days ago
Full-time
On-site
Cambridge, MA USA; San Francisco, CA USA
$232,000 - $360,000 USD yearly
Leadership
Moneyboard classification: Published range reaches threshold
Reported USD annual base: $232,000–$360,000
Original source: Greenhouse
Your Impact at LILA
As Associate Director/Director, Frontier and AI Product Counsel at Lila Sciences, you will be the dedicated legal partner to the teams building Scientific Superintelligence™ — our AI research organization, our AI Science Factory™ platform, and the data, safety, and security functions that support them. You will own the legal questions that come with training frontier models on scientific data and running experiments autonomously: where data comes from and what we can do with it, how rights are allocated when we discover something alongside a partner, what we can publish or open-source, and how we build, evaluate, and release capable systems responsibly.
This is deliberately a build role, not a maintenance role. Much of this work has no settled precedent and no off-the-shelf playbook — you will frequently be designing the framework rather than applying one. You'll partner daily with scientists, ML researchers, platform engineers, and our safety and security teams, and closely with our privacy, commercial, and go-to-market colleagues as the platform is deployed, and you'll be the person who translates between technical reality and legal risk in both directions.
This role reports to the Vice President, Associate General Counsel, Product and is scoped for an experienced attorney with 7–12 years of experience who wants to work at the intersection of law, AI, and science, and who is energized rather than unsettled by novel questions. You should be comfortable with ambiguity, opinionated about risk, and willing to sit with a research team long enough to actually understand what they're building.
What You'll Be Building
Data and model development
Advise research and data teams on permissible data usage across the training pipeline, and build the provenance and acquisition frameworks that govern what goes into Lila's models
Serve as a subject matter expert on copyright, licensing, privacy, and contractual restrictions as applied to training data — public, licensed, synthetic, open-source, and partner-contributed alike
Support structuring and negotiation of data licensing, material transfer, consortium, and research collaboration agreements with academic, clinical, and industry partners, including how rights in data, models, and derived outputs are allocated
Release and disclosure
Advise on release decisions for models, agents, tools, and datasets, including open-weight strategy and the application of open-source licenses to incoming and outgoing code, data, and model artifacts
Coordinate legal readiness for model and platform launches — model documentation and system cards, capability evaluations, and review of pre-release and internal-only models
Support publication and disclosure review, balancing scientific openness against partner obligations and safety considerations
Counsel research teams on research design, data collection and sharing, external collaborations, and program launches, including alignment, interpretability, and societal-impact work as those functions develop
Counsel platform teams on legal considerations for autonomous experimentation and agentic systems
Safety, security, and dual-use
Partner with our AI Safety and AI Security teams on the legal dimensions of technical mitigations, evaluations, red-teaming, and misuse prevention, including vendor engagements and external collaborations
Advise on dual-use and biosecurity considerations arising from autonomous chemistry and biology, including screening, access controls, and disclosure
Help operationalize Lila's safety framework as capabilities scale: how capability thresholds translate into evaluations, access controls, documented mitigations, and release decisions
Serve as a first-line contact for safety and security escalations, and build the playbooks that let that response scale
Regulation and infrastructure
Track and translate the regulatory landscape that bears on our work: emerging AI regimes (EU AI Act, US state AI laws), health and research data rules, human-subject and biospecimen requirements, and export controls
Support compute and infrastructure arrangements, including cloud and datacenter agreements, cross-border data transfers, and data localization
Represent Lila in regulatory inquiries, and contribute to industry and academic work on data governance and safety norms for AI-driven science
Building the function
Design the frameworks, templates, and self-serve guidance that put legal judgment in the hands of the teams who need it, and use AI tools aggressively to extend the reach of a small team
What You'll Need to Succeed
J.D. and membership in at least one U.S. state bar in good standing
7–12 years of legal experience, with substantial time in-house at a technology, AI, or life sciences company, ideally spanning both research-facing and product- or customer-facing counseling
Depth in at least two of: copyright and IP, data licensing and provenance, privacy and data protection, AI regulation, model launch and deployment counseling, or research and collaboration transactions — and the appetite to get up to speed fast on the rest
Genuine technical fluency: you can hold your own in a conversation about how models are trained, evaluated, and deployed, you can read a research protocol without needing it translated, and you can spot the legal issue inside a technical design
Sound judgment under uncertainty, and the ability to give clear, practical advice on questions where the law has not caught up, including when to be flexible and when to hold a line
A strong sense of ownership and the instinct to build cross-functional relationships, so teams bring you in while decisions are still open rather than after them
Excellent written communication — you can draft a policy, a framework, or a whitepaper that non-lawyers will actually use
Comfort operating outside your areas of expertise, wearing many hats, and moving at startup speed without losing rigor
Bonus Points For
Reported USD annual base: $232,000–$360,000
Original source: Greenhouse
Your Impact at LILA
As Associate Director/Director, Frontier and AI Product Counsel at Lila Sciences, you will be the dedicated legal partner to the teams building Scientific Superintelligence™ — our AI research organization, our AI Science Factory™ platform, and the data, safety, and security functions that support them. You will own the legal questions that come with training frontier models on scientific data and running experiments autonomously: where data comes from and what we can do with it, how rights are allocated when we discover something alongside a partner, what we can publish or open-source, and how we build, evaluate, and release capable systems responsibly.
This is deliberately a build role, not a maintenance role. Much of this work has no settled precedent and no off-the-shelf playbook — you will frequently be designing the framework rather than applying one. You'll partner daily with scientists, ML researchers, platform engineers, and our safety and security teams, and closely with our privacy, commercial, and go-to-market colleagues as the platform is deployed, and you'll be the person who translates between technical reality and legal risk in both directions.
This role reports to the Vice President, Associate General Counsel, Product and is scoped for an experienced attorney with 7–12 years of experience who wants to work at the intersection of law, AI, and science, and who is energized rather than unsettled by novel questions. You should be comfortable with ambiguity, opinionated about risk, and willing to sit with a research team long enough to actually understand what they're building.
What You'll Be Building
Data and model development
Advise research and data teams on permissible data usage across the training pipeline, and build the provenance and acquisition frameworks that govern what goes into Lila's models
Serve as a subject matter expert on copyright, licensing, privacy, and contractual restrictions as applied to training data — public, licensed, synthetic, open-source, and partner-contributed alike
Support structuring and negotiation of data licensing, material transfer, consortium, and research collaboration agreements with academic, clinical, and industry partners, including how rights in data, models, and derived outputs are allocated
Release and disclosure
Advise on release decisions for models, agents, tools, and datasets, including open-weight strategy and the application of open-source licenses to incoming and outgoing code, data, and model artifacts
Coordinate legal readiness for model and platform launches — model documentation and system cards, capability evaluations, and review of pre-release and internal-only models
Support publication and disclosure review, balancing scientific openness against partner obligations and safety considerations
Counsel research teams on research design, data collection and sharing, external collaborations, and program launches, including alignment, interpretability, and societal-impact work as those functions develop
Counsel platform teams on legal considerations for autonomous experimentation and agentic systems
Safety, security, and dual-use
Partner with our AI Safety and AI Security teams on the legal dimensions of technical mitigations, evaluations, red-teaming, and misuse prevention, including vendor engagements and external collaborations
Advise on dual-use and biosecurity considerations arising from autonomous chemistry and biology, including screening, access controls, and disclosure
Help operationalize Lila's safety framework as capabilities scale: how capability thresholds translate into evaluations, access controls, documented mitigations, and release decisions
Serve as a first-line contact for safety and security escalations, and build the playbooks that let that response scale
Regulation and infrastructure
Track and translate the regulatory landscape that bears on our work: emerging AI regimes (EU AI Act, US state AI laws), health and research data rules, human-subject and biospecimen requirements, and export controls
Support compute and infrastructure arrangements, including cloud and datacenter agreements, cross-border data transfers, and data localization
Represent Lila in regulatory inquiries, and contribute to industry and academic work on data governance and safety norms for AI-driven science
Building the function
Design the frameworks, templates, and self-serve guidance that put legal judgment in the hands of the teams who need it, and use AI tools aggressively to extend the reach of a small team
What You'll Need to Succeed
J.D. and membership in at least one U.S. state bar in good standing
7–12 years of legal experience, with substantial time in-house at a technology, AI, or life sciences company, ideally spanning both research-facing and product- or customer-facing counseling
Depth in at least two of: copyright and IP, data licensing and provenance, privacy and data protection, AI regulation, model launch and deployment counseling, or research and collaboration transactions — and the appetite to get up to speed fast on the rest
Genuine technical fluency: you can hold your own in a conversation about how models are trained, evaluated, and deployed, you can read a research protocol without needing it translated, and you can spot the legal issue inside a technical design
Sound judgment under uncertainty, and the ability to give clear, practical advice on questions where the law has not caught up, including when to be flexible and when to hold a line
A strong sense of ownership and the instinct to build cross-functional relationships, so teams bring you in while decisions are still open rather than after them
Excellent written communication — you can draft a policy, a framework, or a whitepaper that non-lawyers will actually use
Comfort operating outside your areas of expertise, wearing many hats, and moving at startup speed without losing rigor
Bonus Points For