Senior Commercial Counsel

What You'll Do

We’re looking for a lawyer with 7+ years of practicing attorney experience to join our small and collaborative legal team. The right candidate will have worked at a technology company, be technically savvy and hard-working, keen to learn our products and business, and willing to dig into a wide variety of projects in a fast-paced environment. On the commercial side, this encompasses complex data in-licenses, as well as customer sales and automotive OEM deals. Most of our commercial deals involve substantial work with our product and engineering colleagues, so there is a product-counseling aspect to this position as well.

This is a senior individual contributor role where you will come up with practical and creative solutions to get complex deals done and advance our business. Drafting and communication skills are extremely important. We believe that it is the role of in-house counsel to own the deal. You will develop the ability to both mitigate and accept risk. We almost never say to our colleagues “that’s a business issue for you to decide.”

Mapbox’s customers use our SDKs and APIs to build their own location-aware applications. Our products are building blocks that our customers can use in various different ways, so our sales agreements are technically more complex than in an enterprise software or SaaS software company. We don’t believe that lawyers can give good legal advice in a vacuum, so you must be able to become very conversant with and draft agreements based on our specific customers’ use case and technical implementations. We are not processing hundreds of small sales deals with tweaks to the governing law clause. Instead, our data in-licenses and sales/OEM deals are complex and require a thoughtful approach by a senior lawyer. While we work closely together and thus teach and learn from each other every day, you will not have direct reports.

We think it’s important to continually be improving operational processes/updating forms because this is how we can scale a small legal organization, supporting a fast-growing tech company. You need to share and participate in these efforts to scale our department and improve our services. Prior work in a pre-IPO company will be extremely helpful.

We are a flat organization, but we pitch in and help each other. You must be willing to roll up your sleeves and dive into a variety of legal issues, enjoy the give and take of collaboration and take feedback.

The breadth, variety and complexity of projects that you will handle at Mapbox is great training for cross-functional generalists who want to better understand and practically address business problems and risk.

What We Believe are Important Traits for This Role

• 7+ years of practicing attorney experience, with 2+ years at a top-tier law firm in any area and 5+ years in-house at a technology company in sales-side commercial transactions (not procurement or privacy/regulatory compliance).

• At least one of the following is required:

  1. Computer engineering, computer science or other similar technical degree.

  2. At least 2, but not more than 4, years experience in software patent litigation or patent prosecution at a top tier firm.

  3. Extensive experience working with APIs and SDKs.

• Experience working on complex sales deals.

• Excellent communication skills. Your writing and verbal communications need to be clear and concise.

• A practical and customer-centric orientation and negotiation style. You understand (or will quickly learn) the business deal so you know what matters and what doesn't and will focus on practical resolutions to speed deals through the pipeline.

• A sense of humor. We take our work seriously, but we try not to take ourselves too seriously.

• The legal team is working entirely remotely. While we think candidates who live near technology hubs often have the best backgrounds, we will consider remote candidates who live anywhere in the US. We prefer candidates in the Pacific time zone.

• JD degree from top-tier law school and active membership in at least one US state bar.

• If your resume doesn’t clearly demonstrate the first two points above, you should include a cover note as to why you are interested in this role and why you think you would be a good fit despite not meeting those criteria. Resumes without a cover note in those circumstances will likely not be considered.

What We Value

• We value high-performing creative individuals who dig into problems and opportunities.

• We believe in individuals being their whole selves at work. We commit to this through supportive health care, parental leave, flexibility for the things that come up in life, and innovating on how we think about supporting our people.

• We emphasize an environment of teaching and learning to equip employees with the tools needed to be successful in their function and the company.

• We strongly believe in the value of growing a diverse team and encourage people of all backgrounds, genders, ethnicities, abilities, and sexual orientations to apply.