Lead Counsel

Location: Remote (US) Pacific time zone preferred Salary: $225,000 - $275,000 plus bonus Sniffies is a fast-growing, location-based GBTQ+ cruising app that connects users in real time, fostering a community built on spontaneity, authenticity, and sexual freedom. With live location-based browsing, interactive groups, and a focus on spontaneous meetups rather than traditional dating, we're redefining how connection, exploration, and community happen online. At Sniffies, we value openness, autonomy, and authenticity, both for our users and our team. We're a small, agile organization building technology that supports privacy, self-expression, connection, and sex-positive experiences. Our work sits at the intersection of technology, culture, identity, privacy, and trust and safety. The role This is a broad, high trust builder role for an experienced consumer technology lawyer who can serve as Sniffies' primary day-to-day legal partner and a go-to resource for novel, sensitive, or high-impact issues across the business. You will work closely with product, engineering, trust and safety, marketing, operations, and leadership. The questions will often cut across traditional legal specialties and may arise with incomplete information or little precedent. We are looking for someone who can quickly understand the issue, identify the material legal and business risks, determine what needs to happen next, and help the company move forward. The role will focus heavily on product counseling, privacy and data protection, trust and safety, platform and regulatory risk, law enforcement response, and other sensitive user and business facing matters. You will also support commercial contracting, marketing and advertising review, trademark and IP matters, and other day-to-day legal needs. Just as importantly, you will help build and run the legal function as the company grows. This hands on role combines direct responsibility for day to day legal work with developing durable processes, playbooks, escalation paths, and knowledge systems. The emphasis is on scaling the function through sound judgment, effective use of outside counsel, and thoughtful application of AI and other tools, rather than building a traditional legal department. What You'll Do Serve as Sniffies primary day to day legal partner Advise product, engineering, design, and business teams on feature development, launches, user experience, privacy and data protection, consumer protection, trust and safety, platform risk, and related regulatory requirements. Help teams spot and evaluate legal questions and translate legal complexity into practical recommendations, decision frameworks, and clear next steps. Triage a broad range of incoming legal issues, identifying what can be handled directly, what requires cross functional involvement, and what to escalate to leadership or specialized outside counsel. Partner closely with Trust & Safety and Operations on sensitive matters involving users, platform integrity, safety, investigations, and enforcement decisions. Manage responses to subpoenas, warrants, emergency requests, law enforcement inquiries, regulatory inquiries, and other sensitive third party requests, coordinating with internal stakeholders and outside counsel where appropriate. Monitor emerging legal and regulatory developments relevant to the business and help determine their practical implications for product, operations, policy, and risk management. Support the broader business Lead drafting, review, negotiation, and counseling on commercial agreements, including vendor, marketing, creator, strategic, and other business arrangements. Advise marketing, communications, and growth teams on campaigns, advertising claims, promotions, content, partnerships, and consumer protection considerations. Partner with specialized outside counsel on trademark clearance, portfolio management, infringement issues, brand protection, and other IP matters, while providing practical day to day guidance to internal teams. Manage outside counsel thoughtfully and efficiently, using specialized expertise where it adds value while maintaining a strong bias toward practical, business oriented advice in-house. Build and run the legal function Create practical intake, triage, escalation, template, playbook, and knowledge-management systems that make legal support easier to access and more consistent across the company. Use AI and other tools to improve legal research, first drafts, issue spotting, knowledge retrieval, request routing, training materials, and repeatable guidance. Work with technical and business teams when appropriate to improve the systems through which legal work is requested, performed, documented, and reused. Continuously refine how the legal function operates as the company, product, and regulatory environment evolve. Act as a pragmatic business partner Work closely with leaders across the company to enable thoughtful risk taking and responsible innovation. Give clear advice even when the law is unsettled, the facts are incomplete, or there is no perfect answer. Distinguish material risk from theoretical risk and help teams understand available options and tradeoffs. Be responsive, solutions-oriented, and comfortable moving between strategic questionsand hands-on execution. Who You Are You are a strong consumer technology or platform lawyer who enjoys being a broad generalist and wants to help shape a legal function early on. You have excellent judgment and are comfortable being the person colleagues call when an issue is unusual, sensitive, urgent, or does not fit neatly into one legal category. You have meaningful experience across several areas relevant to the role, such as product counseling, privacy and data protection, trust and safety, platform regulation, law enforcement process, regulatory response, commercial contracting, marketing and advertising, or consumer protection. We do not expect one person to be a specialist in all of them. You can take an ambiguous issue, identify the key facts and risks, determine who needs to be involved, and turn it into a practical action plan. You are business-oriented and pragmatic. You help teams understand risk, evaluate tradeoffs, and reach workable answers rather than simply identifying problems. You can work effectively with engineers, product managers, trust and safety teams, operators, executives, marketers, and outside counsel. You are a player-coach who enjoys both setting direction and doing the work. You are equally comfortable advising leadership on major regulatory questions, personally handling day to day legal matters, and developing the systems that make the function more effective. You are motivated by building a highly capable legal function, not necessarily a larger legal team. You are a systems thinker who notices recurring work and looks for ways to improve it through better processes, templates, tooling, institutional knowledge, and appropriate use of AI. Preferred Qualifications 7+ years of relevant legal experience, including meaningful in-house experience at a technology, consumer internet, platform, marketplace, social, dating, creator, or subscription business. Experience serving as a lead lawyer or highly autonomous legal advisor, whether in-house or in private practice, with responsibility for managing complex matters, advising clients or business stakeholders, and driving legal work independently. Significant product counseling experience, ideally involving consumer facing technology, privacy, data, trust and safety, or other regulated product issues. Experience working through regulatory questions and translating legal requirements into practical product or operational changes. Experience handling subpoenas, warrants, law enforcement requests, emergency disclosures, investigations, or other sensitive external requests. Experience with commercial agreements, marketing or consumer protection review, or practical IP counseling. Strong academic credentials from a well-regarded law school, coupled with a demonstrated track record of professional achievement and success in increasingly responsible roles. Admission to practice law in at least one U.S. jurisdiction. Why This Role Matters Legal at Sniffies touches some of the most important questions facing the company: how products are designed, how user privacy and safety are protected, how the company responds to rapidly changing regulation, how sensitive situations are handled, and how the business makes thoughtful decisions when the answers are not always obvious. What gets standardized, what gets escalated, what gets automated, what requires specialized counsel, and where experienced legal judgment adds the most value. For the right person, it is an unusually broad opportunity to help shape product and policy, guide sensitive matters, protect and enable the business, and build a legal function that becomes more effective and scalable as Sniffies grows. Equal Opportunity Sniffies is committed to building an inclusive workplace and welcomes candidates from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives.