Counsel / Associate Director, Sr. Counsel

THE OPPORTUNITY

insitro is a physical AI company dedicated to unlocking causal human biology and accelerating the delivery of better medicines to patients. Our unique Virtual Human™ platform identifies novel, high-impact genetic intervention points, which our TherML™ platform translates into therapeutics, whether small molecules, biologics, or oligos. With multiple programs in metabolic disease and neuroscience advancing toward the clinic, and our first CTA/IND submission slated for the second half of this year, we are at a pivotal inflection point.

We are seeking a pragmatic, high-output attorney to join our Legal team as Counsel or Senior Counsel, with level set by experience. You will be the daily legal partner to research, lab and technical operations, IT, procurement, finance, and HR, covering commercial and operational matters, compute and infrastructure. This is a high-volume role on a small team: you will own your matters end to end, build and enhance the templates and processes the company runs on, and have an opportunity to grow your scope as insitro grows.

You will also be practicing at the frontier of two fields that are both moving fast, drug discovery and artificial intelligence, often on questions that have no settled answer yet. The Legal department here is small, senior, and low-ego, with a genuine seat at the table: scientists, engineers, and the management team come to us early rather than at the end. We are building the function itself, including how AI reshapes legal work, so you will have real influence over the tooling, templates, and processes insitro uses for years. Based in South San Francisco, this position reports directly to the Associate General Counsel and offers an in-person hybrid schedule of three days per week.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Commercial & Operational Contracting

- Own the Contract Flow: Draft, review, and negotiate the agreements that run the company day to day, including CDAs, MSAs and SOWs, consulting agreements, and vendor, supplier, and equipment terms.

- Be the Front Door: Serve as a primary legal contact for the business and R&D teams, triaging incoming requests, setting expectations, driving matters to close on business timelines, and escalating issues to the AGC as needed. Provide business-oriented advice colleagues can act on without a follow-up meeting.

- Partner with HR: Supporting onboarding and offboarding processes, as well as contractor and similar engagements.

Research & Technical Partnership

- Translate Science into Terms: Support lab operations and R&D teams on MTAs, research services agreements, and reagent and instrument purchases, working directly with scientists to turn experimental plans into workable contract terms.

- Help Advance the Pipeline: Support CMC and Research & Development teams on CRO and CDMO agreements.

- Contract for Compute: Negotiate the cloud, compute, and infrastructure agreements that underpin insitro's machine learning platforms.

Legal Operations & Scale

- Build for Scale: Own and improve contract templates, trainings, playbooks, approval workflows, and CLM tooling so routine work moves faster with less legal involvement.

- Build and deploy AI Tools: Put AI tools to work inside the Legal function to accelerate contract review, drafting, and knowledge management.

- Counsel and Advise: Depending on your experience and capabilities, scope may also include data privacy and compliance support, clinical trial contracting, corporate and governance support, or mentorship of junior colleagues.

ABOUT YOU

Experience & Qualifications

- Proven Tenure: 2–7+ years practicing law, with a combination of law firm and in in-house experience or exclusively in-house experience.

- Bar Admission: J.D. from an accredited U.S. law school and admission in good standing to at least one State bar, preferably California, or eligibility for California registered in-house counsel status.

- Contracting at Volume: Demonstrated track record draftin …