Senior Counsel, Product (Hardware Safety & Customer Support)

About the Team

OpenAI's Legal team plays a crucial role in furthering OpenAI's mission by tackling innovative, fundamental legal issues in AI. If you're passionate about doing significant and unique work as a technology lawyer, this team is for you. The team comprises professionals from diverse fields, including technology, AI, privacy, IP, corporate, employment, tax law, regulatory, and litigation.

About the Role

As a member of our Product Counsel team, you will assist with legal initiatives related to our consumer hardware products and technologies. You’ll work closely with the customer support, operations, product safety, environmental compliance and engineering teams building and providing support for our consumer hardware products. This is a unique opportunity to engage directly with the forefront of legal and AI consumer devices. This role reports to our DGC of Hardware.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will

• Be the go-to counsel and partner for several teams focused on consumer hardware product safety, customer support and material/environmental composition compliance.

• Anticipate, plan for, build to prepare for addressing product safety, regulatory, privacy and consumer protection issues and other legal risks and mitigations.

• Develop strategies for handling legal issues in creative ways and build processes for scaling flexible solutions that address risk.

• Become an expert in AI embedded consumer hardware products, consumer protection issues that relate to them, and help strategize related legal policy positions.

You’ll enjoy this role if you

• Have 8+ years of experience with a mix of in-house and technology-focused law firm roles.

• Understand the letter of the law and can approach problems in a practical, principled approach.

• Build cross-functional relationships and communication styles that resonate with teams to balance risk-taking with responsible development.

• Have a strong sense of ownership, self independence, self starter mentality, are inquisitive and enthusiastic about technology, enjoy being continually challenged, and can demonstrate sound judgment in ambiguous situations.

• Have a JD and license or qualification to practice in CA.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you