THE ROLE

As our first in-house legal hire, you'll be a hands-on Senior Legal Counsel who helps stand up AirGarage's legal function from the ground up. You'll partner closely with our CEO and leadership team across sales, operations, product, finance, and engineering to protect the business, enable deals, and clear the path for aggressive growth.

This is not a "review contracts and wave the red flag" role. You'll own the full spectrum of legal work across a company that operates physical infrastructure in 40+ states: commercial contracts with property owners, multi-state regulatory and permitting compliance, data privacy, employment law, and vendor negotiations. You'll also support our outside counsel relationships and serve as a key thought partner on strategic initiatives including real estate acquisitions and M&A.

This job is for someone who has done real legal leg work at a fast-moving, operationally complex company (not someone who managed a bunch of others responsible for execution and isn't willing / able to do the work themselves). You'll help shape the processes, playbooks, and infrastructure that enables AirGarage to move fast without breaking things, turning legal from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Own the contracts that matter: Draft, negotiate, and close commercial agreements with property owners, vendors, strategic partners, and technology providers. Build and maintain a scalable library of templates, playbooks, and fallback positions so the sales and ops teams can move fast with guardrails.
• Support M&A execution: Assist with acquisitions across the full deal lifecycle; diligence, risk allocation, LOIs, purchase agreements, ancillary documents, closings, and post-close integration. Help develop repeatable processes that let us execute deals efficiently as we scale this strategy.
• Enable real estate acquisitions: Partner with leadership and third-party partners on direct real estate acquisition - entity structuring, purchase agreements, title and diligence review, zoning and land use analysis, and financing documentation.
• Own multi-state compliance: Maintain and extend our regulatory and permitting compliance infrastructure across 40+ states. Stay ahead of evolving regulations-from municipal parking ordinances to state-level data privacy and ALPR statutes, and proactively surface risks before they become fires.
• Protect our data practices: Own privacy policy, data governance, and compliance related to license plate recognition, camera systems, and driver data. Ensure our practices meet or exceed requirements under California's ALPR statute and analogous laws nationwide.
• Protect our intellectual property: Manage AirGarage's IP portfolio, including trademarks, patents, and trade secrets. Oversee prosecution and maintenance of filings, coordinate with outside patent and trademark counsel, and build the internal processes for identifying and protecting novel IP as the company continues to develop proprietary technology and operational methods.
• Advise on employment and people matters: Provide practical, business-oriented counsel on employment law across multiple states (Including: offer letters, terminations, independent contractor classification, handbook policies, and state-specific compliance.) Be a thought partner to leadership and recruiting on sensitive people situations.
• Coordinate outside counsel: Support relationships with external firms for litigation, complex transactions, antitrust review, and specialized regulatory matters. Know when to bring in outside help, how to scope engagements tightly, and how to keep spend disciplined.
• Support fundraising and corporate governance: Collaborate with the CEO and VP of Finance on cap table matters, board governance, investor rights agreements, and data room readiness for future capital raises.
• Build the legal operating system: Develop and refine legal intake processes, contract lifecycle management, policy documentation, and approval workflows. Leverage tools to create leverage - we want a legal function that scales with the business, not one that requires headcount to match growth.
• Be a true business partner: Serve as a trusted advisor to the CEO and leadership team. The best version of this role isn't the person who finds reasons to say no, it's the person who finds the fastest, safest path to yes.

WHAT YOU NEED 🦚

• Hands-on experience within a lean legal function: You've been the sole or primary legal person at a high-growth company, or worked in a very small in-house team, and have personally drafted contracts, managed compliance, run diligence, and advised leadership (not delegated it to associates).
• Equal parts strategist and executor: You're comfortable toggling between 10,000-ft strategy and ground-level detail. You'll negotiate a $5M acquisition at 10am and redline a vendor NDA at 2pm, and neither feels beneath you.
• Transaction experience: You've meaningfully supported M&A deals, ideally multiple acquisitions at a growth-stage company. You know what a clean purchase agreement looks like, how to run diligence efficiently, and how to operationalize deal terms post-close.
• Multi-state operational fluency: Experience advising a business that operates physical locations, assets, or services across many states. You understand the patchwork of state and local regulations and know how to build compliance systems that scale.
• Commercial contracts depth: Strong command of MSAs, SOWs, licensing agreements, revenue-share structures, partnership agreements, and vendor contracts. You can draft from scratch, negotiate with sophistication, and build templates that let non-lawyers self-serve on routine deals.
• Data privacy knowledge: Familiarity with privacy regulations, (Big plus if you have experience with regulations as they related to cameras, LPR/ALPR, and location data.) Experience building or maintaining privacy policies and compliance programs.
• Story + judgment: Clear communicator who can translate legal risk into business terms for executives and operators. You lead with "here's how we can do this" not "here's why we can't."
• Builder mentality: You've built (or haver the expertise to build) legal playbooks, templates, SOPs, and contract management infrastructure from scratch. You find satisfaction in creating systems that outlast individual transactions.
• Bias for action: You move fast, exercise judgment, and improve the system every cycle. You know when "80/20 and shipping" beats "perfect and late." Your mindset is that Legal should never slow the company down and exists to help the rest of the business move faster and more confidently.
• Strongly preferred: Real estate or proptech background, prior work at a company executing a roll-up or multi-unit acquisition strategy, and California bar admission.

WHY THIS ROLE MAY NOT BE FOR YOU

Please review this section before applying. We are sharing this information up front because we don't expect this job to be appealing to everybody and we do not want to waste your time if you are not on board with all of the following.

Being the sole in-house legal team member a high growth startup means many different things, but there is one thing above all that it certainly means: legal risk, compliance posture, and the quality and speed of commercial deal execution are ultimately your responsibility to own.

This will be a hard job. We work long hours at AirGarage, including nights and weekends, because we love what we do. We are growing fast but our legal function is lean, so every day you will have new challenges and too much on your plate, but you'll be expected to find a way to deliver anyways.

Below are some of the reasons you might not want this job:

• You want a big team on day one. This is an IC role as a team of one. If you prefer directing a legal department to doing the work yourself, this won't feel right.
• You expect a perfect playbook. We're building legal infrastructure, standardizing contract processes, and standing up compliance systems. You'll be writing the playbook while running the plays.
• You only want to do "strategic" work. We need someone who can think about M&A deal structure in the morning and chase down a parking permit in Tulsa in the afternoon. Range and willingness to do unglamorous work is non-negotiable.
• You see legal as a control function. We want a business partner who enables growth, not a gatekeeper who slows it down. If your instinct is to add process and require approvals, we're probably not a fit.
• You're uncomfortable with ambiguity. We operate in 40+ states with a novel business model. There isn't always a clear precedent. You'll need to exercise judgment, move forward with imperfect information, and be right most of the time.
• You want to stay in your lane. You'll touch everything - contracts, M&A, compliance, employment, privacy, corporate governance. If you want to specialize, a bigger company with a bigger legal team is a better fit.

IMPORTANT NOTE

AirGarage is a remote-first company, but we also value in-person collaboration to strengthen trust and teamwork. Team members should expect ~6 weeks of travel per year for:

• 2-3 full company offsites, "Remote Weeks"
• Lending a hand to support one new location launch
• In-person onboarding as well as supporting other onboarding sessions for new team members

The rest of the year, team members can work remotely from wherever (US time zones) they're most comfortable as long as they are performing well in their role. Attendance at in-person events throughout the year is expected-if you're not open to traveling ~6 weeks per year for work, our team won't be a good fit for you.

THE UPSIDE

• Equity: Have a stake in the business that you're helping to build and grow.
• Work remotely: Live and work wherever you like! We believe in folks working where they are happiest and most productive. We currently hire teammates that are located anywhere within North America.
• Health insurance: We offer health insurance and currently cover 85% of the cost of medical, dental, and vision plans for the primary employee and 50% of the cost of plans for dependents.
• Parental Leave: We offer 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave to all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. The 12 weeks can be taken as a continuous leave or intermittently over the first 18 months of the child's life.
• Home office setup: Get a laptop + additional equipment needed to set you up for success.
• ⛺ Time to recharge: We have an unlimited PTO policy with a minimum requirement of 10 days per year.
• 🤑 401k: Make financial planning right for you with a 401k retirement savings program.
• Team Off-sites: ~2 times per year our team comes together for a full week in places like Tahoe, Charleston, San Diego, Park City, and Austin.
• BookGarage: Our team loves to learn and grow together, so join us for our optional recurring book club.
• 🪴Room to grow: Our team will be orders of magnitude larger within a few years; as a part of our foundational team, you'll have opportunities to grow with us.
• 🏙 Transform our cities: The opportunity to change the way that the world thinks about real estate use in our cities.
• 👐 Work with a diverse team: At AirGarage, we've always been committed to building a thriving team that represents the communities we serve. Our team is currently 40% female and 30%+ from underrepresented communities.