Principal Product and Privacy Counsel

Summary

Temporal is looking for a Principal Product and Privacy Counsel to serve as a core legal partner to our Product, Engineering and Security teams. This role will embed into the product development lifecycle, helping teams move quickly while identifying and addressing legal, privacy, and IP risks early.

This is a senior individual contributor role. The person in this role should be excited to operate as a hands-on, high-impact IC for a period of time, while also being open to building and scaling a product and privacy legal function over time as business needs evolve.

We are building for developers and the open source community. We are looking for someone with strong technical fluency, comfort engaging directly with engineers, and a practical understanding of open source and modern cloud products.

What you'll do

• Serve as the primary legal advisor to Product, Engineering and Security teams, to spot legal, privacy, and IP issues early in the development cycle and propose pragmatic paths forward
• Own and evolve the global privacy program, including GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, and emerging U.S. state and international privacy requirements, with a strong emphasis on privacy-by-design and product architecture
• Draft, review, and negotiate privacy-related contractual terms, such as data processing agreements, privacy addenda, SCCs where applicable, and related customer and vendor privacy obligations
• Advise on open source software licensing, including inbound and outbound dependency management, license compatibility analysis, and contribution policies
• Structure and negotiate complex technology transactions and commercial terms that intersect with product, including SaaS agreements, API/SDK licenses, OEM arrangements, and platform integrations
• Advise on cybersecurity legal requirements, incident response planning, and breach notification obligations across applicable jurisdictions
• Provide legal guidance on AI/ML related product features, including data provenance, model governance, and evolving AI regulation
• Partner with Security on SOC 2, ISO 27001, and other compliance efforts as they intersect with legal obligations and customer commitments
• Develop and maintain internal policies, playbooks, and training materials that enable Product and Engineering teams to self-serve on recurring legal and privacy questions

What you'll need

• Admitted and in good standing in at least one U.S. jurisdiction
• 8+ years of in-house experience supporting product and engineering teams in a technology company, with comfort advising on fast-moving product development and platform changes
• Strong working knowledge of intellectual property concepts relevant to software products, including open source contribution and licensing norms, trade secrets, and product-related IP risk spotting, ideally in a developer tools, infrastructure, or OSS-adjacent business
• Technical fluency and an ability to translate between legal requirements and product and engineering implementation realities
• Experience counseling on AI/ML product features and emerging AI regulatory requirements.
• Sound judgment and a practical approach to risk that enables speed while protecting the business and our users
• Clear writing and communication skills, including the ability to produce crisp guidance and documentation that teams can use
• A low-ego, roll-up-your-sleeves approach, stepping outside traditional swim lanes when the business needs it and treating every problem, big or small, as your own
• A genuine passion for process improvement, automation, and applying AI tools to legal workflows

You'll Thrive in This Role if You Have

• People management experience or demonstrated ability to mentor and develop junior team members
• Privacy certifications (e.g. CIPP/US, CIPP/E, CIPT)
• Experience with privacy and compliance tooling (e.g., OneTrust or similar)
• Familiarity with FedRAMP, GovCloud, or public sector compliance requirements
• International privacy experience beyond GDPR, such as APAC or Latin American data protection frameworks
• Experience with security incident response or breach notification in practice

Compensation

• The estimated pay range for this role is $225,000 - $340,000 depending on 1) level and experience and 2) geographic location
• Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Temporal’s equity plan.