Associate Counsel (Innovation and Thought Leadership)

Join Airbnb's Commercial & Technology Legal team as an Associate Counsel, focusing on intellectual property transactions and open source. You'll partner with various teams across the company to support the infrastructure and products used by millions of people worldwide. This role involves transactional and counseling work, not litigation or patent prosecution. You'll work on strengthening open source governance and compliance, helping technology teams share their work, and negotiating university research and data agreements.

• Strengthening open source governance and compliance for both what we use and what we release, including the evolving overlap between open source and AI.
• Partnering with authors from concept through publication, reviewing external content, advising on what can go public versus stay internal, and weighing in on moonlighting and side-project requests.
• Negotiating university research and data agreements, including IP and publication rights, and drafting and reviewing IP and licensing terms in intercompany and other commercial agreements.
• The ideal candidate is adaptable, collaborative, practical, and business-minded, with strong judgment and a clear commitment to Airbnb’s Core Values
• Licensed attorney in good standing of the bar of at least one U.S. state or territory
• Experience drafting and negotiating IP and licensing provisions across a variety of agreements
• Strong analytical and risk-framing skills, with practical cost/benefit judgment in a fast-moving environment
• At least three years as an attorney at a law firm, in government, or in-house, including meaningful work in technology transactions and advising technical teams
• Good sense of humor, disdain for drama, and desire to get things done
• Familiarity with AI licensing, particularly where it intersects with open source
• Passion for travel and deep appreciation for the Airbnb community
• Sound judgment on what to handle independently and when to escalate
• Grounding in open source licensing and compliance
• Able to manage multiple matters, prioritize, and drive them to resolution with high ownership
• Working knowledge of copyright, trademark, and patent fundamentals and how they apply in technology and product contexts
• Clear written and verbal communication, including translating complex legal issues for non-lawyers
• Direct experience advising engineering, data science, infrastructure, or developer platform teams
• Experience negotiating sponsored research agreements and contracting with universities, public or private
• Familiarity with common open source licenses (e.g., MIT, Apache 2.0, GPL/LGPL, AGPL) and typical compliance workflows (e.g., dependency review, notices, attribution, policy-based approvals)
• Exposure to marketing and advertising law in external messaging, such as FTC basics, endorsements and testimonials, substantiation, and comparative claims
• Deeper experience with AI/ML IP issues, such as training-data rights, model and dataset licensing, and output ownership
• Enough technical fluency to sit with engineers, whether from a technical degree, coding experience, or hands-on work with ML or developer tools
• Experience using/building legal self-service tools and agents