Senior AI Legal Counsel - AI Legal

The Global Legal Business Partner, AI team provides front-line legal support for ByteDance’s AI products and businesses, spanning foundation models, AI platforms and applications, enterprise services, robotics, and hardware. We partner with teams throughout the product lifecycle to help turn emerging technologies into responsible products and services for users and businesses around the world.

AI technology is advancing rapidly while laws, regulatory expectations, and industry standards continue to take shape across markets. We work alongside Product, Trust and Safety, Policy, Communications, and other cross-functional teams to strengthen AI governance, provide guidance on safety, privacy, and intellectual property considerations, and support responsible product development in line with evolving requirements.

You will contribute as significant AI products and capabilities are being built, bringing legal judgment to decisions that shape their design, development, and deployment. This is an opportunity to influence how ByteDance advances AI responsibly at scale while working at the forefront of law and technology.

About the Team

ByteDance's AI Product and Frontier Risk Counseling team provides domain expert legal support to the company's AI products and models, in particular supporting our Seed business. The team is growing fast and as we scale, we’re looking for a seasoned lawyer to serve as a global legal expert and strategist who can pair deep policy expertise with a builder’s mindset as they help to guide our teams to turn cutting-edge ideas into trusted, world-class products. The role will be an integral resource for ByteDance's AI product and business teams by helping to craft strategic, market-facing narratives for our AI businesses that unlock new opportunities while also helping to solve some of the most challenging AI issues globally, including implementing policies, standards and best practices relating to frontier AI risk domains.

This is a highly collaborative, on-site role that requires five days per week in the office located in Washington, D.C.

Responsibilities

• You will champion AI, working as a global subject matter expert helping to identify and resolve legal issues relating to emerging and frontier AI risks. You will also help craft strategic, market-leading legal strategies for our AI businesses that unlock new opportunities.
• Collaborate with the AI product, TnS, Legal, AI Safety, PR and GR teams to establish and implement solutions to emerging compliance issues for frontier AI models.
• Identify, assess, and communicate the rapidly evolving global AI regulatory requirements and trends; support implementations by the product team.

Minimum Qualifications

• Juris Doctor from an ABA-accredited law school and active membership in good standing in at least one U.S. state bar.
• Have a strong knowledge and interest in the legal challenges in frontier and emerging AI risk areas, including CBRN, cyber and loss of control as well as areas including IP, privacy, bias and AI transparency.
• Proven experience counseling on AI and ML, IP and cyber security,. Experience in both private practice and in-house experience at a technology platform company would be advantageous.
• Demonstrated success shaping policy outcomes or market launches for novel technologies.
• Possess the highest standard of ethics and a positive attitude in learning and willing to pick up new knowledge and skills; comfortable navigating through ambiguous legal issues
• A builder’s bias for action, you can turn ambiguity into frameworks, experiments, and shipped products and have a strong track record of achieving alignment with internal cross-functional teams and external partners.
• Credibility with engineers and policymakers alike: you can dive into model architectures one minute and brief a regulator the next.

Preferred Qualifications

• Willingness to be flexible to attend meetings outside of office hours, due to the global nature of this team