Deputy General Counsel, Commercial (Marketing)

About the Team OpenAI’s Legal team plays a crucial role in advancing our mission by tackling innovative and fundamental legal issues in AI. The team includes professionals from diverse legal fields—technology, AI, infrastructure, privacy, IP, corporate, employment, tax, regulatory, and litigation—who collaborate closely with colleagues across the company. If you are passionate about being a technology lawyer working on cutting-edge challenges, you’ll thrive here. About the Role We are seeking an experienced attorney to serve as the commercial legal lead for Marketing. Based in San Francisco, you will be a primary legal partner to OpenAI’s rapidly growing global Marketing organization, supporting high-impact campaigns, creative production, talent and creator relationships, sponsorships, events, and the agreements and rights that make that work possible. You will work closely with Marketing, Communications, Partnerships, Procurement, Finance, Product, and colleagues across Legal, including Product, Privacy, Regulatory, and IP/Brand, to deliver practical advice at the pace of the business. This is a unique opportunity to help shape OpenAI’s Marketing efforts, negotiate sophisticated transactions, and build scalable legal frameworks for responsible global growth. We operate on a hybrid work model of three days per week in the office and offer relocation support for new employees. In this role, you will: Serve as the commercial legal lead for Marketing, partnering closely with Brand, Creative, Product Marketing, Design, Film and Photo, Performance Marketing, Partner Marketing, Communications, and regional teams from concept through launch. Draft and negotiate a wide range of marketing and entertainment agreements, including agency, production, talent and creator, sponsorship, event, media, content-licensing, marketing-technology, and vendor agreements. Structure and clear the rights needed for campaigns and content, including talent and appearance releases, publicity and likeness rights, user-generated content, copyright and trademark permissions, music, artwork, locations, footage, and multi-channel media use. Provide fast, practical counseling on campaign execution, public claims and disclosures, endorsements, promotions and offers, social and paid media, coordinating with specialist counsel where appropriate. Support high-profile talent, creator, partner, sponsorship, event, and launch matters; identify true blockers early, calibrate risk, and propose workable alternatives that keep projects moving. Manage matters through intake, vendor onboarding, review, approval, signature, and launch, collaborating with Marketing Operations, Procurement, Finance, Business Affairs, Legal Operations, and external counterparties. Develop and maintain scalable templates, playbooks, training, and workflows that enable self-service for routine work and focus legal review on novel issues, redlines, and exceptions. Stay current on evolving advertising, consumer-protection, endorsement, privacy, platform, and AI-transparency requirements and translate them into clear guidance for global teams. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 15+ years of relevant legal experience across in-house and technology, media, entertainment, or advertising-focused law firm roles. Bring deep experience drafting and negotiating complex marketing, advertising, entertainment, production, sponsorship, talent, creator, content-licensing, and technology transactions. Understand advertising and consumer-protection law, endorsements and promotions, IP and content rights, publicity and privacy issues, and the practical requirements of digital, social, paid, broadcast, and out-of-home media. Have led legal support for fast-moving, high-visibility campaigns and launches, and make sound, practical decisions with incomplete information and compressed timelines. Are comfortable independently leading a complex legal workstream—entrepreneurial, proactive, and able to create structure in a fast-changing environment. Can turn recurring legal issues into clear templates, guardrails, and processes that scale. Communicate with clarity and business judgment, build trusted cross-functional relationships, and adapt your style to diverse audiences. Bring a strong sense of ownership, intellectual curiosity, sound judgment, and enthusiasm for technology and the novel legal issues created by AI. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement. Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. 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