Commercial Counsel

This role can be office-based in Freiburg, Germany or remote-first, with a requirement to be in the office one full week per month.

About Black Forest Labs

We’re the team building the foundational layer for visual intelligence: multimodal models trained jointly on images, video, audio, and action to see, generate, and understand the world.

Our founding team pioneered latent diffusion and Stable Diffusion, the breakthroughs that made generative AI accessible to millions. With FLUX, we're pushing into generative media at scale, machines that act in the physical world, and emerging applications in computer use.

Our FLUX models top public benchmarks and run in production in some of the world's biggest platforms. We're a small, fast growing research lab competing with the largest companies in the world. From our labs in Freiburg to San Francisco, we're building what comes next.

Why This Role

We are looking for a sharp, motivated, commercially minded Commercial Counsel to join BFL’s legal team. You will support a broad range of commercial transactions across our EU and US go-to-market deals. This is a high-ownership role in which you will draft, review, and negotiate agreements, and help structure and maintain operations across the legal and go-to-market teams.

This is an exciting opportunity for a lawyer who wants to work at the cutting edge of AI: advising on novel agreement structures for foundational generative AI models, negotiating complex licensing and API deals, and helping build the legal and commercial infrastructure of a high-growth company.

What You’ll Work On

• Partner closely with the GTM, Marketing, FDE, Infrastructure, and Finance teams to negotiate contracts and provide practical, deal-enabling legal advice

• Support EU (and, as needed, US and UK) commercial transactions, focusing primarily on EU-centric deals across a variety of industry verticals, and advise on German corporate law

• Contribute to company-wide compliance and legal operations initiatives as the legal team scales

• Help develop and maintain scalable legal frameworks, contract templates, playbooks, and approval workflows

What We’re Looking For

• 7+ years of legal experience, including commercial transactions in the technology sector, ideally spanning both in-house roles and private practice. Start-up or high-growth company experience would be an advantage.

• Demonstrated experience negotiating and closing complex technology agreements, including software licensing, API and platform deals, data and content agreements, and partnership contracts.

• Prior experience supporting EU commercial deals, with comfort navigating cross-border transactions and a strong awareness of key jurisdictional differences.

• Excellent drafting and negotiation skills, with the ability to identify material issues quickly and communicate them clearly to non-lawyers.

• Low ego and high accountability: as comfortable rolling up your sleeves on routine agreements as you are handling high-stakes or novel deal structures.

While not required, it’s an added plus if you also have:

• Experience negotiating robotics, technical manufacturing, and hardware contracts

• Experience with products subject to export regulation in the EU

• Experience with AI/ML, developer platforms, or foundational model licensing

• Exposure to generative AI in prior roles; familiarity with how AI products are built, licensed, and deployed will meaningfully accelerate your effectiveness in this role

• A JD from an accredited law school and qualification in Germany or the UK

• Familiarity with German corporate law, the EU AI Act, GDPR, or other international regulatory frameworks relevant to AI and data

• A background advising on IP, copyright, or data licensing matters in the context of AI training or model development

How We Work Together

We’re a distributed team with real offices that people actually use. You’ll be based in Europe and work from your home location, with one week each month spent with us in Freiburg to stay connected with the team.

Everything we do is grounded in four values:

• Obsessed. We are a frontier research lab. The science has to be right, the understanding deep, the product beautiful.

• Low Ego. The work speaks. The best idea wins, no matter who said it. Credit is shared. Nobody is above any task.

• Bold. We take the ambitious bet. We ship, we do not wait for conditions to be perfect.

• Kind. People over politics. We treat each other with genuine warmth. Agency without empathy creates chaos.

If this sounds like work you’d enjoy, we’d love to hear from you.

Compensation

EU: €150,000 - €200,000 + equity

Note: We may use AI-assisted tools to help organize applications. All hiring decisions are always made by our team.