About The Role:We're looking for a highly pragmatic, business-minded
Corporate Counsel to join Paraform's growing team and serve as our first Legal hire. You'll partner with teams across the company, helping us navigate the increasingly complex legal questions that come with scaling a high-growth technology company and marketplace.
This is a broad, hands-on role. You'll move between negotiating commercial agreements, advising on marketplace and employment issues, partnering with Product on new features, supporting corporate matters, and helping build the legal processes and infrastructure that allow the business to scale.
We're looking for someone comfortable operating with ambiguity, who can balance risk with business needs, exercise strong judgment, and help find practical paths forward.
What You'll Do- Commercial: Draft, review, and negotiate customer, vendor, partnership, and other commercial agreements; help develop scalable contracting processes and templates.
- Product & Marketplace: Partner with Product and Operations on new products, marketplace policies, recruiter/customer relationships, and evolving legal and regulatory questions.
- Employment: Support the People team on employment matters, including performance management, terminations, compensation, policies, and employee relations.
- Corporate: Support financings, equity matters, corporate governance, board matters, and other strategic transactions.
- Privacy & Compliance: Support practical privacy, data protection, security, and broader compliance programs as Paraform scales.
- Legal Operations: Help build repeatable legal processes, templates, playbooks, and systems that allow the company to move faster without introducing unnecessary risk.
- Business Partnership: Translate complex legal issues into clear, practical guidance and recommendations for stakeholders across the company.
Required- Active membership in the California Bar, or active membership in another U.S. jurisdiction with eligibility and willingness to register as California Registered In-House Counsel.
- 2+ years of relevant legal experience, including experience advising technology or high-growth companies.
- Experience advising marketplace, platform, or recruiting/staffing businesses, including legal and regulatory issues related to marketplace operations, worker classification, and customer/provider relationships.
- Strong commercial experience, including drafting and negotiating customer, vendor, partnership, and other business agreements.
- Ability to work across a broad range of legal matters, including corporate, commercial, employment, product, privacy, and emerging issues.
- Strong business judgment with the ability to assess risk and provide practical, actionable guidance.
- Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment and helping build processes from 01.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
Preferred- Combination of law firm and in-house experience, particularly at a startup or high-growth technology company.
- Experience with employment law, including performance management, terminations, compensation, policies, and employee relations.
- Experience partnering with Product and Engineering on privacy, data protection, AI, and product counseling.
- Experience supporting financings, equity, corporate governance, board matters, or M&A.
- Experience helping build legal infrastructure, including templates, playbooks, contracting workflows, and compliance programs.
- Experience managing outside counsel to get to the right outcomes in a cost-effective manner.
- Experience using & experimenting with AI tools in daily workflows.
