Lead Counsel - Data Licensing & Privacy

We're Ooak Data

Ooak Data turns company data into training data for AI agents.

Frontier labs can train models to reason. They cannot train them to work: navigating a real company's Slack threads, half-finished Notion docs, contradictory Jira tickets, and permission boundaries. That requires real enterprise data, and you cannot synthesize it. You have to source it.

We plug into enterprise tools, anonymize everything into a structurally identical digital twin, and generate reinforcement-learning environments with expert-level tasks calibrated against frontier models.

🤝 Our values

• Trust, the foundation of every relationship, internal and external. We extend it by default and value the ownership that comes with it.
• Ambition, we commit, we move fast, with tenacity and efficiency.
• Collective, team first, low ego.
• Kindness, at the heart of every interaction.

The offer

📍 Location: Paris (city center), on-site with 1 to 2 days WFH

🕐 Start: as soon as you are available

💼 Contract: full-time (CDI)

💰 Compensation: fixed salary + bonus + equity (BSPCE)

✅ Your missions

Every dataset we sell exists because a company decided to trust us with the most sensitive asset they own. That trust is a legal construction before it is anything else, and right now it is held together by three founders, outside counsel and a lot of care.

As our first legal hire, you own it. You report directly to Grégoire (COO & co-founder) and work daily with Pierre-Louis (CEO) and the tech and ops teams.

• Own our legal and privacy posture. You set the standard that lets a CEO hand us their company's data, and the standard that lets a frontier lab buy what comes out. You decide what we commit to, what we refuse, and where the line sits.
• Own our data licensing contracts. Templates for the EU and the US, redlining and negotiation alongside the COO and directly with the companies we buy data from. These contracts are the product's foundation: every deal runs through them.
• Negotiate the sell side. The agreements with the frontier labs we sell to, where the stakes per contract are the highest in the company.
• Own the legal framework of anonymization. With the tech and ops teams, define what "anonymized" actually means in our pipeline, in law and not in theory, and be the person who can defend it to a partner's counsel, a lab's counsel, or a regulator.
• Lead SOC 2 and ISO 27001 end to end. You drive the projects, choose the auditors, chase the evidence and get us certified. Technical controls come from the tech team, the outcome is yours.
• Raise our quality bar. Our processes get better when someone asks the hard questions early. You will be one of the people who do, well beyond the strictly legal scope.
• Light corporate and employment support where it helps, though most of it stays with outside counsel. This is not a general counsel job in disguise.

🔍 Who we're looking for

• 7 to 10 years of experience, in a top-tier firm, in-house, or both, with real ownership of data matters.
• Qualified lawyer, jurisdiction flexible: US bar, French avocat, or equivalent. We care about judgment, not about which bar you sit at.
• Deep expertise in data protection and data licensing law. Not privacy-adjacent, not privacy as one file among twenty. This is the core of the role.
• Dual US and EU coverage, with US law weighted the most. You are credible on the American side and solid on GDPR and the European framework.
• You have negotiated data agreements yourself, redlined them, sat across the table, and closed them. You are not a reviewer of other people's drafts.
• Pragmatic in a fast-moving company. You give an answer, not a memo with five options. You know the difference between a real risk and a theoretical one, and you say which is which.
• Comfortable being the only lawyer in the room, and comfortable saying no to founders when it matters.
• Fully fluent in English and French, both mandatory. English is our working language with the labs and across the team, French is the language of our Paris team and of part of our partner and contractual work.

The extras that make the difference

• Experience at an AI company, a data provider, or a data-intensive business where data was the product.
• You have taken a company through SOC 2 or ISO 27001 before.
• Genuine interest in how AI models are trained and why the data we produce matters.
• Experience of anonymization or de-identification as a legal and technical question, not just a policy line.
• A third language, useful as we open more European markets.

🎁 Why join us

• The legal function is yours to build. No existing framework to inherit, no precedent to defend. You decide how this company handles data.
• Legal is not a support function here. The contracts you write are the product, and your answers are what close deals.
• A genuinely new problem. How to buy, anonymize and license real company data for AI training is being figured out right now, in the open, by a handful of people. You would be one of them.
• Entrepreneurial adventure: founding impact, live the early days of an ambitious company at the front line of the AI revolution.
• Backed by Y Combinator, join just as we accelerate.
• Offices in central Paris.
• Perks: Alan health insurance (mutuelle), 50% Navigo covered.

Interview Process

✏️ Recruitment process

We move fast.

• A 30 min intro call with Grégoire (co-founder)
• A 60 min deep dive with Grégoire: your track record, the deals you have negotiated, how you handle risk
• A practical case on a real data licensing situation of ours
• A final fit interview with the founding team