Senior AI Product & Partnerships Counsel

We are building AI to simulate the world through merging art and science.

We believe that world models are at the frontier of progress in artificial intelligence. Language models alone won’t solve the world’s hardest problems – robotics, disease, scientific discovery. Real progress requires models that experience the world and learn from their mistakes, the same way that humans do. And this kind of trial and error can be massively accelerated when done in simulation, rather than in the real world.

World models offer the most clear path to general-purpose simulation, changing how stories are told, how scientific progress is made and how the next frontiers of humanity are reached.

Our team consists of creative, open minded, caring and ambitious people who are determined to change the world. We aspire to continuously build impossible things and our ability to do so relies on building an incredible team. If you are driven to do the same, we'd love to hear from you.

*Titles posted to our careers page are updated regularly to best advertise the role and expected seniority, but internally we have a flat titling system with two types of titles: one for individual contributors and one for people managers.

About the role

Preferable to have someone near one of our offices in NYC or San Francisco, but open to hiring around the US for the right candidate.

Join the frontier of shaping generative AI video and its legal landscape as an early lawyer at Runway wearing multiple hats. As AI Product & Partnerships Counsel, your mission is to enable the company to ship better products faster and accelerate product and data partnerships and other go-to-market deals. You are a self-starter who thrives at getting things done in fast-paced, unstructured environments. You have a passion for building scalable initiatives across our product and commercial legal workstreams.

You will serve as a strategic partner to product, engineering, partnerships, sales, marketing, and the Runway Executive Team. Comfort working within a highly technical, rapidly evolving area of the law is a must.

What you’ll do

• Become a go-to advisor for product legal matters, from design to launch, by providing pragmatic, product-motivated advice
• Accelerate AI product development and integrations by building playbooks and streamlining legal review of partnership deals, including data partnerships, IP and model licensing, procurement, reseller, and marketplace agreements
• Accelerate AI product adoption by closing deals with Runway’s strategic partners and customers. These include B2B SaaS customer contracts for our generative AI SaaS platform and APIs, DPAs, and order forms.
• Dive into the technical aspects of our generative AI products to learn them inside and out, to inform your advice to the business
• Closely follow (and even shape) technical, legal, and policy developments in AI and translate them into practical product guidance
• Implement practices allowing our legal team to scale our impact on the business, including enablement, self-serve resources, and AI-enabled automation

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

• 6+ years of relevant experience, including in-house experience at a fast-paced technology company
• Experience advising product development leaders and executives across a broad range of issues, especially IP and privacy
• Experience closing partnership and go-to-market deals, such as data partnerships; IP and model licensing; robotics, hardware, and compute agreements; reseller; and other partner, customer, and vendor deals
• Experience providing practical recommendations to senior leaders with limited time and information
• Sound judgment in ambiguity: track record of gathering key information quickly and helping the business make smart decisions
• Deep sense of ownership, whether you're advising our CEO on a novel legal issue or testing your new AI-enabled workflow for the nth time
• Bias for action: why put something off if you can do it now?
• Demonstrated interest in AI, creative tools or both
• J.D. and admission in good standing with at least one state bar

NICE TO HAVE

• Generative AI models and agentic workflow understanding and interest
• Experience closing strategic, IP-heavy partnerships
• Experience in B2C and B2B industries and in product-led and enterprise businesses
• Experience closing B2B SaaS customer deals
• Big Law and/or hypergrowth tech startup experience

Runway strives to recruit and retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity for our team. Our salary ranges are based on competitive market rates for our size, stage and industry, and salary is just one part of the overall compensation package we provide.

There are many factors that go into salary determinations, including relevant experience, skill level and qualifications assessed during the interview process, and maintaining internal equity with peers on the team. The range shared below is a general expectation for the function as posted, but we are also open to considering candidates who may be more or less experienced than outlined in the job description. In this case, we will communicate any updates in the expected salary range.

Lastly, the provided range is the expected salary for candidates in the U.S. Outside of those regions, there may be a change in the range, which again, will be communicated to candidates.

WORKING AT RUNWAY

Great things come from great teams. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwmj4ato2kw&ab_channel=Runway We’d love to hear from you.

We’re committed to creating a space where our employees can bring their full selves to work and have equal opportunity to succeed. So regardless of race, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, origin, ability, age, veteran status, if joining this mission speaks to you, we encourage you to apply.

More about Runway

• Universal World Simulator https://runwayml.com/world-simulator.html
• GWM-1 https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-runway-gwm-1
• Gen-4.5 https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-runway-gen-4.5
• General World Models https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-general-world-models
• Robotics SDK https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-runway-gwm-1#robotics-section
• Conversational Real-time Agents https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-runway-gwm-1#avatars-section
• Runway Studios https://runwayml.com/studios

We're excited to be recognized as a best place to work:

Crain's https://www.crainsnewyork.com/awards/best-places-work-2023 | InHerSight https://www.inhersight.com/companies/best/city/new-york-city-ny | BuiltIn NYC https://builtin.com/awards/new-york-city/2024/best-places-to-work | INC https://www.inc.com/best-workplaces/2024