Commercial and Product Counsel

About the role

At Arceus, we believe the way companies receive legal support is overdue for reinvention. Legal teams today are expected to move faster than ever while supporting increasingly complex commercial, product, privacy, procurement, and operational work. Yet the tools and delivery models available to them haven't kept pace. We're building the legal infrastructure layer for modern companies, combining experienced attorneys with intelligent technology to deliver high-quality legal services at the speed growing businesses demand. Our attorneys don't just practice law. They help shape the systems, playbooks, and technology that make every engagement better than the last. Working alongside engineers and product teams, they transform legal expertise into scalable workflows that redefine how legal work gets done.

This is a rare chance to:

• Help build the legal infrastructure layer that modern companies rely on.
• Turn existing judgment and playbooks into innovative products.
• Own meaningful equity in a company reshaping a trillion-dollar market.
• Help define how technology transforms the delivery of legal services over the next decade.

Ideal candidate

You're an attorney who enjoys serving as a trusted legal partner to growing companies. You've spent several years advising businesses on commercial transactions and ideally have experience supporting product, privacy, or other day-to-day legal matters. Whether you've worked in-house or in private practice, you're known for delivering practical advice, moving quickly, and spotting the details others miss. We're especially excited to meet attorneys who have served as the sole legal counsel or one of the first legal hires at a company. You're comfortable wearing multiple hats and balancing competing priorities across the legal function.

What success looks like

• First 14 Days: You're onboarded onto our tooling and workflows and reviewing client legal matters independently at our quality bar.
• First 30 Days: You've documented review playbooks for your recurring contract types, privacy, and product inquiries, and are consistently hitting quality and turnaround standards.
• 3 Months: You've helped codify how Arceus reviews commercial contracts, advises on product matters, and contributed to a product moat your playbooks made possible, and set a standard the rest of the team ramps against.

Responsibilities

• Serve as Commercial and Product Counsel to help us scale our contract review and legal service operations.
• Work directly with customers as an extension of their in-house legal team, delivering practical, business-oriented advice.
• Work closely with both our legal and product teams to ensure commercial contracts are processed efficiently and accurately.
• Review and negotiate commercial contracts, advise on product and privacy matters, and deliver high-quality legal guidance across the day-to-day needs of growing technology companies.
• Collaborate with legal team members to interpret contract terms and identify key obligations, risks, and anomalies.
• Operate Arceus’s internal tooling and workflows to streamline document review, and partner with product and engineering to make the platform faster and more accurate over time.
• Identify inefficiencies or patterns in the review process and suggest improvements.
• Help standardize and codify recurring contract types, review playbooks, and quality standards.
• Support turnaround and SLA commitments; when the team is under pressure, you pitch in to deliver. Customer experience comes first.
• Partner cross-functionally with operations to evolve our legal service delivery model as we scale.

Qualifications

• J.D. and active bar membership in good standing in California.
• 5-8 years of experience practicing law, including significant experience supporting technology companies. Experience as in-house counsel or as a sole legal counsel is strongly preferred.
• Experience in corporate, commercial, product, and privacy law; exposure to the emerging companies / venture capital (EC/VC) space is a plus.
• Impeccable attention to detail; you spot the small stuff others miss.
• A strong process mindset; you're always thinking about how to do something faster, better, or with more consistency.
• Experience with, or genuine excitement about, technology-enhanced and AI-assisted legal workflows.
• Comfort working in a fast-paced, sometimes ambiguous, high-ownership environment.
• Strong grounding in professional responsibility and legal ethics.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Pay

Competitive base salary: $150,000 – $210,000

Benefits

• Meaningful equity stake in the company.
• Health, dental, and vision coverage.
• Unlimited PTO.