Senior Legal Counsel
About the role
This is a hands-on Senior Legal Counsel position at AirGarage, a company aiming to bring real estate online, starting with parking. The role involves protecting the business, enabling deals, and clearing the path for aggressive growth. Key responsibilities include drafting, negotiating, and closing commercial agreements, supporting M&A execution, enabling real estate acquisitions, maintaining multi-state compliance, protecting data practices, managing intellectual property, advising on employment and people matters, coordinating outside counsel, and supporting fundraising and corporate governance.
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.
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.
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 relate 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 have 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."
Why This Role May Not Be For You
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.
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.