Commercial Counsel - Europe in London

We are an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents. We're the makers of Devin, the first AI software engineer, and Windsurf, the AI-native IDE. Together, they represent our vision for collaborative AI teammates that enable engineers to focus on more interesting problems and empower teams to strive for more ambitious goals. Our team is small and talent-dense. Among our founding team, we have world-class competitive programmers, former founders, and leaders from companies at the cutting edge of AI including Scale AI, Palantir, Cursor, Waymo, Tesla, Lunchclub, Modal, Google DeepMind, and Nuro. Building Devin and Windsurf is just the first step—our hardest challenges still lie ahead. If you’re excited to solve some of the world’s biggest problems and build AI that can reason on real-world tasks, apply to join us.

About the Role

As Commercial Counsel for EMEA, you will sit at the centre of a fast-moving commercial legal function, managing a high-volume workflow of complex negotiations across AI SaaS licensing, marketing, and partnership agreements. You will be the primary legal voice in enterprise-level deals, balancing risk and reward with pragmatism and speed, and ensuring closures that are both fair and commercially sound. This role carries real weight. You will serve as the connective tissue between EMEA markets and a US-based technical and operational team, translating local legal and regulatory requirements into guidance that non-legal stakeholders can act on. That means deep fluency in GDPR, the EU AI Act, DORA, and the broader compliance landscape across the region, and the confidence to advise clearly under pressure.

Beyond day-to-day deal work, you will play a meaningful part in the company's regional expansion, working cross-functionally to establish and launch new markets across EMEA. If you want a legal role with genuine strategic scope, this is it.

In this role you will:

• Lead responsibility for all GTM deals and contract work out of EU and MENA
• Manage GDPR compliance and DPAs
• Manage local regulatory compliance (DORA, EU AI Act, EU Data Act, etc.)
• Manage a high-volume workflow, redlining and negotiating key legal documents, including Licensing, SaaS agreements, and NDAs
• Provide crucial legal guidance, balancing risk/reward, with an understanding of local requirements and parlaying that to a US-based technical and operational team
• Engage with enterprise-level counsel, ensuring swift and fair deal closures
• Advise on compliance with local regulations, including GDPR, EU AI Act, and DORA
• Work collaboratively across teams to establish and launch new markets in EMEA, including providing regulatory and compliance guidance for operating in new regions

Ideally you have:

• 7+ years experience drafting and negotiating commercial contracts, including international trans-national commercial arrangements
• Experience with high-velocity tech company preferred
• Transnational body of work, including Europe, Middle East, and Asia/South Asia
• Must have experience working from local market for US-based company
• Bonus if experience includes launching new markets in EU/MENA localities

Equal Opportunity

Cognition is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the hiring process - please let us know if you need any.