In-House Counsel Commercial Contracts, Data Privacy & Web Scraping Law

Job Description

Job Description

Salary range: $220k - $265k

Location: San Francisco, CA, Bay Area, CA

Hybrid work policy: Hybrid in San Francisco, CA (Lower Haight neighborhood, 800 Haight St). No rigid in-office policy, but 2-3 days per week in office preferred for leadership roles. Flexible as needed — people come in because they want to, not because they're forced to.

In-House Counsel Role

You'll be Firecrawl's first full-time in-house lawyer, owning legal across the business as we scale. Day to day, you'll partner with our revenue teams - redlining customer contracts, MSAs, and DPAs, and moving deals forward quickly without letting risk pile up in the wrong places. You'll also own one of the most important and least-settled areas of law in our space: how the web's data can be sourced, licensed, and served. That means real fluency in the legal landscape of web scraping and public data - crawling practices, robots.txt, terms of service, and the case law around access - and structuring agreements so risk lands where it should across copyright, data access, and privacy. It's a hybrid role: as much time with our engineers on how we source and serve data as with the commercial teams on the paper. You'll report to our Head of Finance and Legal and work closely with the founders, owning real surface area from day one.

What You'll Do

• Structure customer contracts (MSAs and Order Forms) so risk lands in the right place across copyright, data access, and privacy — and so we can serve different types of data to different customers safely

• Own the legal side of our partnership and content licensing deals, structuring them so risk lands in the right place

• Become Firecrawl's expert on the web scraping and public-data legal landscape (crawling, robots.txt, ToS, access case law), and turn that expertise into a competitive advantage

• Work directly with engineering on how we source and serve data — the technical-compliance side, not just the paperwork

• Advise the founders and Head of Finance and Legal on risk, structure, and strategy as we scale through a Series B and beyond

• Build the legal infrastructure — templates, playbooks, and processes — that lets a small team move fast

Who We're Looking For

• You know the web scraping / public data legal terrain cold, or you're hungry to go deep on it fast

• You're as comfortable in a conversation with engineers about how data flows as you are redlining a contract

• You can structure a deal so the risk sits where it should, across copyright, data access, and privacy

• You're comfortable being the only lawyer in the room and making the call

• You translate legal complexity into clear, practical guidance for a fast-moving team

Who We're NOT Looking For

• Someone who needs a large legal department around them

• Someone who defaults to "no" instead of finding the path to "yes, and here's how"

• Someone who wants to stay on the contract and never touch the technical reality underneath it

• Someone uncomfortable with novel, unsettled areas of law