Director, Legal - Commercial (Americas) | United States | Remote

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X.

We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do.

You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity.

The Opportunity:

Grafana Labs is seeking a Director, Legal - Commercial (Americas) to join our dedicated, collaborative and fast-growing team. Reporting to the Deputy General Counsel, Commercial Legal, this role will serve as a senior strategic legal partner to the business, with primary responsibility for leading the company's most complex, high-impact, revenue-generating transactions and partnering closely with sales leadership and other senior stakeholders to structure, negotiate and close sophisticated enterprise SaaS, on-premises and strategic commercial agreements. 

Working closely with the Deputy General Counsel, Commercial Legal, this role will also provide leadership within the Americas commercial legal team by managing, mentoring and developing attorneys, providing guidance on complex negotiations, promoting consistent contracting practices and helping scale the team's operations and processes. This is a true player-coach role combining people management responsibilities with a hands-on, impactful commercial attorney position for someone who enjoys negotiating sophisticated transactions and partnering closely with the business.

This role will also support broader commercial legal initiatives, including advising on strategic go-to-market models, channel programs, privacy and regulatory matters, commercial policies, maintaining and improving commercial legal templates and playbooks and partnering with cross-functional stakeholders on strategic business initiatives.

The successful candidate will be a creative and analytical thinker with exceptional business judgment who is highly detail-oriented and embraces a pragmatic, business-first approach to legal counseling. They will possess the strategic thinking, executive presence and interpersonal skills necessary to build trusted advisor relationships across the organization while remaining approachable, collaborative and solutions oriented.

The successful candidate also brings significant experience leading negotiations of complex, high-value commercial agreements with Fortune 500 and other sophisticated enterprise customers, frequently negotiating on customer paper and within highly regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services and the public sector. They are comfortable navigating novel legal and commercial issues, balancing risk with business objectives and partnering cross-functionally to help drive strategic outcomes.

This individual is an exceptional drafter, strategic negotiator, and people leader who can quickly distinguish material legal risk from negotiable issues and develop practical solutions that keep transactions moving toward successful execution. They have a proven track record of serving as a trusted advisor to business leaders, successfully managing sophisticated counterparties and mentoring attorneys while helping elevate the overall capabilities of the commercial legal team.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Lead the strategy, negotiation and execution of the company's most complex, high-value commercial transactions, including enterprise SaaS, self-managed software, data processing, information security, channel, strategic partnership and other technology-related agreements, including agreements involving artificial intelligence, generative AI and other emerging technologies.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to sales leadership and other senior stakeholders on commercial strategy, deal structuring, negotiation strategy and legal risk to help accelerate revenue while appropriately protecting the company.
• Partner closely with the Deputy General Counsel, Commercial Legal, on significant commercial matters, strategic initiatives and the continued growth and evolution of the commercial legal function.
• Manage and mentor assigned attorneys on the Americas commercial legal team through coaching, performance feedback, and guidance on complex negotiations and legal issues.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to resolve complex commercial and operational issues and support new products, pricing models and go-to-market initiatives.
• Develop and continuously improve commercial agreement templates, playbooks, policies and legal processes to drive consistency, efficiency and scalability across the commercial legal function.
• Evaluate and leverage AI-enabled legal technologies and workflows to improve contracting efficiency, enhance legal operations, support data-driven decision-making and enable the commercial legal team to scale while maintaining high-quality legal work.
• Build strong relationships across the company and foster a practical, collaborative and business-oriented approach to legal partnership

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• JD or equivalent U.S. law degree and active bar membership in good standing in at least one U.S. jurisdiction.
• 10+ years of commercial legal experience supporting technology companies in the SaaS industry with demonstrated experience leading complex, high-value enterprise technology transactions, including negotiations with Fortune 500 and other large enterprise customers.
• Demonstrated experience managing, mentoring and developing attorneys.
• Exceptional judgment with the ability to balance legal risk and business objectives in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
• Proven ability to build trusted relationships with senior business stakeholders and provide practical, business-oriented legal advice.
• Significant experience with data protection and privacy laws (including GDPR and CCPA), information security terms and technology contracting.
• Outstanding drafting, negotiation, communication, and interpersonal skills.
• Proven ability to independently manage numerous complex, business-critical matters and competing priorities.
• Demonstrated ability to improve legal processes, develop scalable contracting resources and drive operational excellence.

Bonus Points For: 

• Recognition from sales or business teams for exceptional partnership, responsiveness and commercial judgment.
• Familiarity with open-source software licensing.

Compensation & Rewards:

In the United States, the OTE (On-Target Earnings) compensation range for this role is $275,000 - $325,000 Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.

*Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs:

• 100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose.
• Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.
• Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
• Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
• Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work.
• Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
• Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
• Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
• Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
• In-Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it. 
• Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect. *We will comply with local legislation where applicable.

Equal Opportunity Employer: Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation, and we work hard to ensure that is the foundation of our organisation as we grow.

Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.

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