Commercial Contracts Lawyer

About the role

Alida is serving enterprise customers across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, including financial services, retail and travel brands. Our contracts move at the pace of our sales cycle, so this role is about giving clear, practical answers quickly and protecting Alida's interests without slowing deals down.

We're looking for a Commercial Contracts Lawyer on a 20-month fixed-term contract. You will own Alida's day-to-day commercial contracting: you will be the first point of contact for contract questions from Sales and Customer Success, and you will review and negotiate our customer, vendor and partner agreements. You will report to the CFO, with support from part-time senior commercial and privacy and AI specialists. The role begins with a structured handover from the lawyer going on leave and ends with a handover back.

Job Responsibilities:

• Contract review and negotiation

  • Review, redline and negotiate the full range of commercial agreements: MSAs and SaaS subscription agreements, order forms and SOWs, NDAs, amendments and renewals, and partner, reseller and referral agreements
  • Work on both Alida's paper and customer paper: large enterprise customers, particularly banks and other financial institutions, often insist on their own templates, so you will map them back to Alida's positions and find workable fallbacks
  • Negotiate the AI and data terms that sit in the commercial agreement itself: restrictions on use of customer data to train or improve models, customer approval or notice rights over AI functionality, AI disclosure commitments, allow-listed AI subprocessors, and the licence-scope and territory limits that go with them
  • Handle regulated-customer requirements as they appear in contracts, such as financial services outsourcing and third-party risk terms (for example DORA in the EU, HIPAA in the US), audit rights, business continuity, subcontracting and exit provisions, working with Security and Compliance on the operational commitments
  • Negotiate directly with customer and vendor legal and procurement teams on routine and moderately complex terms, communicating Alida's positions clearly and constructively; escalate material deviations to the senior contract lawyer or the CFO
  • Maintain and improve our contract templates, negotiation playbooks, fallback positions and approval workflows, and track the deviations we accept so the templates improve over time
  • Co-ordinate with our Deal Desk team on contract execution and ensuring compliance with our standard contracting and revenue recognition practices

• Contract questions and deal support​​​​​

  • Act as the first point of contact for day-to-day contract questions: what a clause means, whether a customer request is acceptable, what our standard position is, and when to escalate
  • Join deal reviews and renewal discussions to advise on commercial terms, auto-renewals, price increases, termination rights, liability and indemnities
  • Support Sales and CS through enterprise procurement: the legal and contractual sections of RFPs, supplier onboarding forms, and legal questions in customer due diligence, coordinating with Security on security questionnaires

• Portfolio and change management

  • Run contract reviews across the existing customer base when Alida launches or changes a product capability: identify which agreements restrict it, summarise the blockers for the business, and prepare and negotiate the amendments, consents or notices needed to clear them, including non-English amendments with support from external counsel
  • Handle first-line contract disputes and escalations: breach and termination notices, service-level and service-credit claims, and customer complaints under existing agreements, instructing and managing external counsel where needed

• Vendor, procurement and other commercial matters

  • Support procurement and vendor management: review vendor, supplier and subprocessor contracts, professional services engagement letters and SaaS terms, and work with Security on third-party risk assessments and contractual protections for Alida's data and IP
  • Support occasional commercial matters such as office lease amendments, incentive and promotional programme terms, and partnership arrangements, working with external counsel where local law requires it
  • Our privacy and AI specialists own the DPA, the privacy schedule and Alida's underlying privacy and AI governance positions. You own how those positions land in the commercial agreement, you negotiate them there, and you escalate where a customer's ask conflicts with them

Job Qualifications:

• Law degree (JD, LLB or equivalent) and current license to practice in a Canadian province (preferred), a US state, or an equivalent common-law jurisdiction
• 4 to 8 years of post-call experience in commercial contracts, in-house or in private practice, including technology or SaaS work
• Hands-on experience reviewing, redlining and negotiating MSAs, NDAs, SaaS or software licensing and vendor agreements, including on the counterparty's paper
• Solid grasp of the clauses that drive SaaS deal risk: limitation of liability, indemnities, IP ownership and licensing, warranties and SLAs, termination, auto-renewal and price escalation, and assignment and change of control
• Working knowledge of data protection, security and AI terms as they appear in commercial agreements (for example PIPEDA, GDPR, CCPA and the EU AI Act) - enough to negotiate them in the agreement, know which positions are fixed, and route the DPA and privacy-schedule work to the right specialist
• Experience contracting with regulated enterprise customers, and with the third-party risk and outsourcing terms they require: audit rights, business continuity, subcontracting, exit and records obligations
• Clear, plain-language writing; comfortable giving a yes, no or conditional answer to a salesperson in a few sentences
• Sound judgment about what to decide yourself and what to escalate
• Strong negotiation and stakeholder management skills; comfortable dealing directly with customers' legal, procurement and privacy teams and advising both commercial and technical colleagues
• Comfortable with legal technology and willing to learn and improve an AI-assisted review tool

Nice-to-haves:

• Prior in-house experience at a SaaS or technology company
• Exposure to contract lifecycle management or AI-assisted contract review tools
• Familiarity with the security, procurement and RFP questionnaires that accompany enterprise deals, and with SOC 2 or ISO 27001 as they come up in customer diligence
• Experience with counterparties in the UK, EU and Asia-Pacific
• Working proficiency in French or German

Additional details:

• The salary range for this position in Canada is from $110,000 - $140,000 CAD per annum. Final salary will depend on experience.
• We are open to candidates across Canada for this position.
• Must be able to start by December 2026 and commit to the full 20-month contract term.

About Alida

Alida believes in a world where customers are respected as the ultimate source of truth. Because knowing the whole truth about your customers can help companies make better decisions and drive long term loyalty and growth.

That’s why Alida helps innovative brands create highly engaged research communities to gather feedback that empowers better customer experiences and product innovation.

Leading companies like HBOMax, Adobe, Warner Bros. Discovery, Twitch and lululemon depend on Alida’s community-centered research platform to deliver fast and reliable customer feedback at scale so they can build better products, refine user experiences and test marketing campaigns.

Learn more at www.alida.com.

We can’t wait to meet you!

We understand that applying for a new position takes effort and want to thank you in advance for taking the time to introduce yourself.

At Alida, we’re dedicated to fostering an environment where our employees feel heard, valued and included.

We believe that a diverse team is a core pillar in building better products and services for our global customers and we strongly encourage applications from all people regardless of race, religion, gender, age, disability status or sexual orientation. Even if you don't meet every single one of the stated requirements but you are excited about this opportunity, we'd love to hear from you anyway. Our Talent Acquisition team will review your application for this role, and others we may have open now or in the future.

Follow us at www.alida.com and engage with us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

Alida has an accommodation process in place to provide reasonable accommodation to employees, and to qualified job applicants with a disability during the hiring process. If you require accommodation because of a disability or medical need, please contact [email protected] so that arrangements can be made for the appropriate accommodations to be in place.

Alida takes your private information seriously. Review our Candidate Privacy Statement here to understand how we use and protect your personal information.

Vacancy Status: This posting is for an existing vacancy that we are actively seeking to fill.

Artificial Intelligence Disclosure: Our recruitment process is human-led. While our Applicant Tracking System (ATS) includes an AI-enabled "talent match" feature to help compare applications against job requirements, this tool is not used as a decision making factor and it is not used to rank candidates by suitability. All applications are personally reviewed by our recruitment team, and all decisions regarding interview selection and hiring are made solely by human employees.

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