Senior Commercial Counsel

Modal is hiring a Senior Commercial Counsel in New York, United States. It pays $250k-$300k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Modal.

Level's read on this job

On Level's scale, this role is Little AI ●○○○: aI is not part of the work.
Level classes it as a senior role.
Modal has 42 other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

About Us:
AI needs a new infrastructure layer. We're building it at Modal.

Every era of computing brought new workloads that previous infrastructure couldn't support: mainframes, databases, and the cloud. Each time, the company that rebuilt the layer underneath defined the decade. AI is no different, except it touches everything instead of one slice, and the window to build the layer underneath it is open right now.

Our customers include category-defining companies like Ramp, Cognition, DoorDash, and Suno. They rely on Modal for instant GPU access, sub-second container starts, and native storage, so it's simple to serve low-latency inference, fine-tune models, and access production-ready sandboxes at scale.

We've passed $1B in annualized run rate, up 15x from a year ago. In October 2026 we raised a $750M Series D led by Accel at a $15.75B valuation.

Our team includes creators of popular open-source projects (e.g.,Seaborn,Luigi), academic researchers, international olympiad medalists, and experienced engineering and product leaders with decades of experience.

The Role:

We’re looking for a Senior Commercial Counsel to join us as the first commercial lawyer at Modal. This is a high-impact role for someone who wants to draft and negotiate a wide variety of commercial agreements and build the templates, playbooks, and positions that guide our operations. You’ll report to our General Counsel and collaborate closely with the Sales, BizOps, Finance, and Engineering teams and help build the foundation for a small but growing legal team.

What You’ll Work On:

Own customer contracting, including MSAs, service orders, NDAs, DPAs, and BAAs, negotiating directly with customers and partnering with the Sales team throughout the full deal cycle
Lead vendor-side contracting, including capex procurement, SaaS tools, and consulting arrangements, among others
Build and maintain contract repositories, template libraries, and contract playbooks
Partner with Legal Operations on our CLM, including approval workflows and escalation logic
Review and revise operational policies (terms of service, privacy policy, acceptable use, and website terms) and customer-facing marketing materials

You May Be a Fit If:

You have approximately 5-10 years of combined law firm and in-house experience negotiating commercial technology agreements, with meaningful time supporting an enterprise sales motion
You have a JD and active bar membership in good standing in New York or California
You’re deeply familiar with SaaS contracting
You’ve worked extensively within Ironclad or a similar CLM
You can build templates and playbooks from scratch
You have working knowledge of privacy and regulatory data protection frameworks, such as GDPR and HIPAA
You have sound commercial judgment and know how to balance risk with the business needs of a high-growth tech company

Nice-to-Have:

Experience with infrastructure, compute, or datacenter supply agreements

How we rate this

Senior Commercial Counsel at Modal rates 33 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.