General Counsel

About This Role

This leadership role involves navigating the legal complexities of a rapidly growing, high-impact, global business. The General Counsel will be a key advisor to the founders and leadership team, helping to make better decisions, pursue opportunities, and identify material risks. The role requires strong commercial and corporate legal expertise, sound business judgment, and the ability to turn complicated legal questions into clear paths forward.

Responsibilities

• Advise the business, partnering with founders and the leadership team on consequential decisions, proactively identifying material legal risks and opportunities, evaluating trade-offs, and developing practical paths forward
• Lead commercial legal matters, structuring, drafting, and negotiating customer, supplier, technology, and strategic partnership agreements, personally leading high-stakes negotiations and establishing efficient processes for routine agreements, while balancing commercial objectives with appropriate protections
• Guide global corporate strategy, advising on international operations, entity structures, inter-company arrangements, expansion, and significant corporate transactions, identifying gaps and exposures as the global business evolves
• Protect intellectual property and business interests, partnering with scientific and technical leaders to establish an effective approach to IP protection, ownership, licensing, and commercialization, leveraging specialist counsel where appropriate
• Navigate regulatory and compliance matters, helping leadership anticipate and address legal implications of new products, markets, and business models, including laboratory and clinical regulation, data privacy, cross-border movement of biological materials, export controls, and other relevant requirements
• Own corporate legal and governance matters, supporting the CEO and board on governance, corporate obligations, strategic transactions, and other significant legal matters
• Build the legal function, establishing the processes, resources, and outside counsel relationships needed to provide responsive, reliable legal support across the business, prioritizing by business impact and keeping bureaucracy and costs in check

Requirements

• Seasoned legal leader who thrives in a growing business, with experience as a senior in-house legal adviser, ideally in a fast-growing company navigating increasing scale, complexity, and international expansion
• Sharp commercial mind, understanding how businesses make money, negotiating complex agreements with confidence, and knowing when to push hard, when to compromise, and how to get important deals done
• Versatile corporate and international legal expert, bringing meaningful experience in corporate law, governance, international structures, and cross-border matters, with the range to navigate unfamiliar legal territory
• Exceptional judgment, seeing around corners, distinguishing real risks from theoretical ones, and helping leaders make smart decisions when the answers aren't black and white
• Builder who gets things done, equally comfortable advising on consequential decisions, rolling up sleeves to solve problems, and creating systems that make Legal more effective as the company scales
• Expert who makes complexity simple, bringing deep legal expertise, intellectual rigor, and common sense, communicating clearly, offering practical recommendations, and making legal matters approachable
• Resourceful and pragmatic, knowing what deserves attention, what can be simplified, and when to bring in specialized expertise, building capabilities without building bureaucracy
• Intellectually curious and technically comfortable, quickly getting up to speed on complex scientific, technical, and regulatory questions
• JD from an accredited law school
• Active membership in good standing with a U.S. state bar
• Experienced working in life sciences, biotechnology, scientific services, or another technically complex or regulated industry, or able to demonstrate strong judgment navigating unfamiliar technical and regulatory environments

About the Company

Plasmidsaurus is on a mission to accelerate new cures and promote a healthier planet by unlocking a new level of productivity for scientists. Its sequencing services are used daily by thousands of innovators, including Nobel laureates, Fortune 100 pharma, and over 70,000 scientists. The company began by revolutionizing plasmid sequencing, making it exponentially cheaper and faster, with innovative sequencing technologies and a global network of laboratories that turn samples into answers in hours, not weeks. Plasmidsaurus is expanding its disruptive model across all of genomics, with the launch of its new RNA-seq service, taking a bold step toward its vision to sequence everything, providing scientists everywhere with faster, simpler, and more affordable access to the data that powers discovery.