Senior Legal Counsel Deep-Tech Hardware Scale-up

The company

A venture-backed London technology company designing its own processors for the AI market. Well into nine figures of funding from leading strategic and institutional investors, growing fast across the UK and North America, and heading towards first product. The legal function is led by an experienced Chief Legal Officer with a big-tech background who is building the commercial team from the ground up.

The role

You’ll be the commercial lawyer on the deals that matter most to a hardware company: manufacturing and supply agreements, development and licensing arrangements with technology partners, and customer contracts with the largest cloud and enterprise buyers. You’ll draft and negotiate them yourself, working directly with the CLO, engineers and commercial leads, and you’ll write the playbooks and standard positions the function runs on as it grows. The IP in those agreements - ownership, licensing, know-how - is yours to structure and protect.

The business moves quickly and much of what you’ll do has no precedent inside it. That is the attraction or it isn’t.

What you’ll do

• Lead negotiation of manufacturing, supply, development, licensing and major customer agreements
• Own the IP position in technology development and supply arrangements
• Set standard terms, fallbacks and templates; build AI-assisted contracting workflows
• Advise on export controls and data protection as they arise in contracts, with specialist external support where needed
• Support the CLO on corporate and regulatory matters that touch commercial work

Who we’re looking for

• Qualified in England & Wales or admitted to a US state bar, roughly 5-9 years’ PQE
• Trained at a leading City, US or comparable international firm
• Technology transactions experience with real IP content - you’ve negotiated who owns what in a development or supply agreement, ideally in hardware or deep tech
• Comfortable with technical subject matter and with engineers
• Direct, pragmatic, and happy owning a position without a partner behind you
• You use AI tools in your own practice and have views on where they help and where they don’t

Highly desirable: hardware supply chain experience; cloud or enterprise customer contracting; export controls; CLM or legal AI tooling.

Why this and not a bigger name

Work in your first year that lawyers at most corporates wait a decade for. Building rather than inheriting. Equity at the early stage. A CLO who has done this before and wants a lawyer who’ll take the deals, not watch them.

Visa sponsorship and relocation available for US-qualified lawyers. Eligibility is subject to export control requirements, explained at first conversation.