Legal, Partnerships & Strategic Transactions

ABOUT BASETEN

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.

THE ROLE

We are hiring a senior attorney to lead the legal work behind Baseten's partnerships and strategic transactions. This is the seat where model labs, hyperscalers, distribution platforms, and our largest customers meet, and where the licenses that govern open weight models get read, negotiated, and turned into commitments we can stand behind. Reports to the Chief Legal Officer, works directly with the founders and partnerships leads, and shares the deal surface with the rest of the legal team.

Not every partnership is about revenue. Some are about awareness and being the place a lab launches. Some are about compute, capacity, and maintaining optionality. Some are about market share and developer adoption, and some are about not being locked out of a channel a competitor is building. This role has to see which game each deal is playing, structure for that, and know when a relationship that looks strategic is really a dependency. The paper is the output. The judgment is the job.

THE QUESTIONS YOU WILL WORK ON

Four questions run through nearly everything this seat touches.

Open weight licenses are becoming a market of their own

The permissive licenses that built open source software are giving way to model licenses with usage thresholds, attribution triggers, certified partner exemptions, geographic carve outs, and commercial only distribution terms, many written by labs outside the United States. Each release is a new instrument. You will read them first and help the market read them right.

Rights follow the license, responsibility follows role

The same model can be a shared API, a dedicated deployment, a customer supplied checkpoint, or a fine tune, and who holds what right changes with each. Whether Baseten is licensee, host, distributor, or acting on a customer's behalf determines what we can promise, what we can indemnify, and what no one in this market can honestly underwrite. Getting that allocation right, and explaining it plainly to a customer's outside counsel, is the core craft.

Partners who are also channels, customers, and competitors

A lab can be supplier, customer, and rival for the same workload. A hyperscaler can be our compute vendor, our distribution channel, and our competitor in one quarter. You will structure for channel conflict, exclusivity, and information flow so Baseten stays independent and customer centric.

Cross border by default

Labs, compute providers, and customers sit in different jurisdictions with different rules on export controls, sanctions, data residency, and what a license permits. Partnership paper and compliance posture have to move together, and you will work with our regulatory and policy leads to make sure they do.

WHY THIS MATTERS TO BASETEN

Our model catalog, distribution relationships, and partner channels are a large part of why customers choose us and why labs launch with us. A license question that stalls a dedicated capacity deal, a distribution term that limits how we serve a customer, or a partnership that creates a conflict we did not see coming has direct revenue and strategic consequences. This role exists to get ahead of those questions and to make Baseten the counterparty labs, platforms, and enterprises trust to get the model layer right.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Lead the legal workstream for model lab relationships: distribution agreements, hosted API and early access arrangements, token and capacity commitments, coalition and joint development agreements, and renegotiations as models and licenses evolve.

Lead strategic platform and channel deals: hyperscaler marketplace and gateway agreements, white label and reseller structures, co-sell and referral arrangements, and enterprise partnerships that combine a customer relationship with a distribution one.

Build and own Baseten's framework for open weight and custom model licenses: how we read them, how they apply across shared, dedicated, customer supplied, and fine-tuned deployments, what we confirm to customers before deployment, and where our indemnities begin and end.

Serve as the legal voice on model licensing questions in customer deals, including direct engagement with customer counsel on license interpretation, attribution and threshold mechanics, and the allocation of responsibility between Baseten, the lab, and the customer.

Advise leadership on channel strategy, conflict, and competition: exclusivity, most favored terms, information flow to partners who compete with us, and the structural protections that keep Baseten independent and customer centric.

Partner with our regulatory, policy, and security leads on the cross-border dimensions of partnership paper, including export controls, sanctions, KYC, and data residency, so that compliance posture and commercial terms move together.