Senior Legal Counsel

Orbital is the AI platform for real estate legal work.

Real estate shapes the world around us: our homes, our workplaces and our cultural landmarks. It’s the infrastructure that powers everyday life and is the world's largest asset class. Yet behind every single deal, real estate and legal teams work hard to navigate decades-old complexity; manually connecting documents, hidden obligations, geo-spatial context, and multiple parties into a path forward. We connect the legal and physical record, so that path is clearer than ever before. Our mission is to make real estate transactions faster, clearer, and less manual.

Here, you'll be part of changing how the deals behind the largest asset class get transacted, and will help shape the future of real estate.

A bit about us:

🚀 We’re building at the forefront of AI technology, without losing the deeply human expertise our clients depend on.

🏢 Orbital is built with former practising real estate lawyers and 250+ years of combined legal expertise. We're purpose-built for the complexity of real estate: accelerating due diligence, drafting and negotiation, and deal coordination with legal-grade precision.

💰 We've just raised a $60m Series B, led by Brighton Park Capital, to accelerate our global expansion – $75m raised to date.

🤝 We're trusted by 5,000+ real estate professionals, spanning UK Magic Circle and US Am Law 100 firms, to household names like M&S. Leading firms like BCLP, Orrick, Goodwin, Womble Bond Dickinson and Clifford Chance rely on Orbital to remove the busywork, freeing legal and real estate teams to focus on sharp judgment, standout client service, and closing deals faster.

💡 Working at Orbital means joining a bold, ambitious team, with the trust to take ownership and make a real impact from day one.

THE ROLE

Orbital has been scaling fast, and our legal function needs to keep up. We currently work with external legal counsel across UK and US matters, and we're now looking for a Senior Legal Counsel to bring on in a FTE capacity, to own our legal function now, and shape how it looks in the future as we grow — bringing structure, strategy, and sharp judgment to everything from commercial contracts to IP protection.

This isn't a fractional legal reviewer or an external-style adviser. It's an embedded business partner — someone who sits alongside product, commercial, and leadership teams to give legal a seat at the table before decisions are made, not after. You'll own what Orbital commits to customers, what the company needs to protect itself against, and how legal shows up when the business is moving fast.

You'll be critical to transforming our legal function from a reactive resource into a proactive partner, by deeply understanding the business and building the processes, playbooks and team required to function in an optimal way for our success.

You’ll report into our Head of Operations, who currently coordinates our external legal counsel and will work closely with you on legal operations, process, and resourcing as you embed into the business.

Ideally, you will be based in NYC and happy to spend a few days a week in office with us to feel fully embedded in the business.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

OPERATIONAL LEGAL COUNSEL

The embedded legal support you provide will keep the business moving forwards.

You will:

- Partner with the global sales teams as they negotiate commercial contracts (standard contracts for our products, NDAs, DPAs)- you will be the legal partner to them, ensuring we secure customers quickly, fairly and in a sustainable way.

- Partner with individuals and teams across the business around vendor contracts - ensuring contracts are reviewed with a legal lens and teams understand what they are signing up for when bringing on new vendors.

- Field legal questions from across the business- knowing when you can advise directly, and when external specialist legal advice is required. These will include queries from the People team (eg. HR and emplo …