Product Counsel (Director) at Whatnot in San Francisco, CA

Job description

🚀 Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot!Whatnot is the largest livestream shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. Whether it's trading cards, fashion, electronics, or live plants, our sellers are building real businesses across hundreds of categories. We're building live commerce at a scale that's never been done in the West, and there's no playbook to copy. The people here are shaping how an entirely new industry develops. As a remote co-located team, we're inspired by our values and anchored in hubs across the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia. We move fast, stay close to our users, and focus on the work that drives the most impact. We're one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news and engineering blogs and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce. 💻 RoleWe're looking for a Product Counsel leader to help build and lead Whatnot's product legal function. This is a player-coach role where you'll manage a small team while staying deeply hands-on across the legal questions that come with scaling a high-growth marketplace. You'll partner closely with Product, Engineering, Marketing, Policy, and Business Development, advising on product launches, consumer-facing features, commercial deals, privacy, and regulatory risk. We need someone who's seen enough legal terrain across areas such as consumer protection, privacy, marketing, payments, and platform policy to step in quickly, prioritize what actually matters, and give the business clear, actionable guidance. Beyond the day-to-day, you'll build the infrastructure that makes the team scale: playbooks, templates, risk frameworks, and the documentation practices that turn legal from a bottleneck into a force multiplier. The ideal candidate is a product counseling generalist who's genuinely curious, moves fast, and knows how to get to yes. You've built something before, not just maintained it. • Strategic Leadership & Team Building • Partner with the Deputy General Counsel and senior leadership to shape the long-term strategy, structure, and priorities of the product counsel function. Manage a high performing product counsel team. Manage a high performing product counsel team. • Co-develop playbooks, frameworks, and scalable processes that allow Whatnot’s product and engineering teams to move quickly while managing legal risk responsibly. • Represent the legal function as a credible, trusted voice in executive-level and cross-functional discussions, including with Whatnot’s leadership team. • Product Counseling & Launch Support • Serve as the primary legal point of contact embedded throughout the product development lifecycle, advising Product, Engineering, Design, and Trust & Safety teams from initial concept through feature release and post-launch iteration. • Identify, assess, and drive resolution of legal issues related to privacy, data security, consumer protection, intellectual property, intermediary liability, advertising, and platform regulation. • Review and advise on product features, user flows, terms of service, in-app disclosures, and marketing claims to ensure legal compliance and appropriate risk allocation. • Advise on novel and rapidly evolving legal areas, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, recommendation systems, generative content, and live streaming regulation. • Regulatory Compliance & Risk Management • Monitor, interpret, and communicate the impact of evolving global regulations – including GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, the EU Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, the EU AI Act, COPPA, FTC rules, and other applicable frameworks – to relevant business and legal stakeholders. • Lead cross-functional responses to new or amended laws affecting product, partnering with privacy and policy colleagues t