Los Angeles, California, United States · Remote OK
$225k–$300k/yr
AE Studio is a ~160-person, fully bootstrapped applied AI company. We've spent over a decade building and shipping production AI for clients in finance, defense, aviation, healthcare, and education, including generating …
Skills: Commercial Transactions, Technology Law, AI Law, Intellectual Property, Contract Negotiation
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Establish and scale the in-house legal function, focusing on outcome-based commercial deals, research grants, and government partnerships. Manage intellectual property, corporate governance, and the relationship with outside counsel.
Requires a JD from an accredited law school and active membership in the California bar. Must have strong experience in commercial transactions and technology/AI law, with a preference for experience in IP, nonprofit, and government sectors.
AE Studio is a ~160-person, fully bootstrapped applied AI company. We've spent over a decade building and shipping production AI for clients in finance, defense, aviation, healthcare, and education, including generating millions per week in additional revenue for a major airline and building the AI-enabled school of the future, where students are performing in the top 1% nationally. Without outside investors we are able to choose where the money goes, and we put it into alignment research through the AI Alignment Foundation, a nonprofit we founded to scale this work.
We're running a DARPA seedling on alignment and control, our policy team engages directly with the government on AI alignment, and our work has been featured many times in the Wall Street Journal. We collaborate with researchers at Anthropic, Princeton University, University College London, Redwood Research, and MATS. The research team is 25 people and growing.
We need our first in-house lawyer. Demand and our own expansion have outpaced what we can handle today: research grants closing, government and national-security work opening up, university and lab partnerships forming, and a shift toward outcome-based commercial work. All of it carries real legal weight and business urgency, and today it sits largely on the founders' shoulders, backed by excellent outside counsel.
You'd start by learning what already works here and helping scale it, then improving and adapting it as new opportunities arise. The timing is the real opportunity: we're 10 years in, established and growing fast, and right at the start of a major inflection point. You'd be here during a step change.
A handful of things are happening at once, and the legal side of each is the core of the role.
Intellectual property runs through all of it, and there's real opportunity in how we own, license, protect, and publish it. Underneath sit the steady in-house workstreams: NDAs and vendor agreements, employment, corporate governance, and the processes that let legal scale.
We're after a strong generalist more than a specialist: solid fundamentals, judgment from real experience, and the ability to pick up new areas fast and get good at them. Day to day you'd work alongside executives, making the key calls and scaling the function.
Specifically, someone with:
Frontier AI Alignment Research, AI strategy, Production AI System Development
AE Studio does frontier AI alignment research, AI strategy, and production AI system development. Bootstrapped. ~150 people. No outside investors. Founded in 2016 in Los Angeles. The independence means we fund alignment research without anyone telling us to stop and we only take on work we actually believe in. Our alignment work includes collaborations with DARPA and Anthropic, publications at top AI conferences, and active research on gradient routing, self-other overlap, endogenous steering resistance, multi-agent systems and several other neglected approaches. We think AI is going to be the most transformative technology of our lifetimes, and we want to make sure it goes well. That means doing the research now, while we still have time to get it right. We bring the same rigor we apply to frontier AI research to helping companies effectively leverage AI. We start with the business problem, not the technology. Technology is moving at a pace that is faster than ever before and we help companies figure out what to do with that: how to restructure teams around AI, where humans add the most value, which problems are worth solving and in what order. We've generated $6M+ in extra weekly revenue for airline companies, developed state-of-the-art neural decoders for brain-computer interface systems, and enabled education companies to serve 10x more students with a 90% contractor cost reduction.
Offices: 13274 Fiji Way, Ste 400, Marina del Rey, California 90292, US
Frontier AI Alignment Research, AI strategy, Production AI System Development
AE Studio does frontier AI alignment research, AI strategy, and production AI system development. Bootstrapped. ~150 people. No outside investors. Founded in 2016 in Los Angeles. The independence means we fund alignment research without anyone telling us to stop and we only take on work we actually believe in. Our alignment work includes collaborations with DARPA and Anthropic, publications at top AI conferences, and active research on gradient routing, self-other overlap, endogenous steering resistance, multi-agent systems and several other neglected approaches. We think AI is going to be the most transformative technology of our lifetimes, and we want to make sure it goes well. That means doing the research now, while we still have time to get it right. We bring the same rigor we apply to frontier AI research to helping companies effectively leverage AI. We start with the business problem, not the technology. Technology is moving at a pace that is faster than ever before and we help companies figure out what to do with that: how to restructure teams around AI, where humans add the most value, which problems are worth solving and in what order. We've generated $6M+ in extra weekly revenue for airline companies, developed state-of-the-art neural decoders for brain-computer interface systems, and enabled education companies to serve 10x more students with a 90% contractor cost reduction.
Offices: 13274 Fiji Way, Ste 400, Marina del Rey, California 90292, US
