--- title: 'Head of Legal at Inferact' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-legal-inferact-san-francisco-8za70prrkyas' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-15' --- # Head of Legal at Inferact - **Company:** Inferact - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-09-09 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/inferact/894029d4-5381-4fd7-9b28-eed06307f796 ## Job description ## Overview Inferact's mission is to grow vLLM as the world's AI inference engine and accelerate AI progress by making inference cheaper and faster. Founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM, we sit at the intersection of models and hardware, a position that took years to build. ## About the Role We're looking for our first in-house legal hire to give Inferact greater leverage across a growing set of legal workstreams. This is a hands-on, high-impact role for an experienced technology lawyer who can personally execute on commercial agreements while serving as the primary point person for all legal matters at the company. This hire will provide immediate in-house legal capacity and, in short order, build out and lead Inferact's legal function. You will own key matters internally, coordinate complex workstreams with outside counsel, maintain cross-functional alignment across the organization, and help the company navigate frontier questions in open source LLM inference space. You will work closely with leadership, product, engineering, GTM, and operations teams. ## Skills and Qualifications Minimum qualifications: - J.D. or equivalent, with active bar admission and good standing in at least one relevant jurisdiction. - 6+ years of legal experience at a technology company, infrastructure or AI business, or a top law firm advising sophisticated tech clients. Prior GC experience is not required. - Experience building or scaling a legal function from 0 to 1, or operating as the sole or first lawyer supporting a fast-growing company. - Strong commercial contracting experience: able to independently draft, negotiate, and close enterprise customer, cloud and compute vendor, partnership, and technology licensing agreements. - Experience managing outside counsel efficiently, with clear internal ownership and a bias toward keeping matters moving. - Hands-on execution mindset—comfortable personally drafting, reviewing, and negotiating in a technically complex, fast-moving startup. - Strong business judgment, with the ability to translate legal complexity into clear, practical tradeoffs for leadership and engineers. Preferred qualifications: - Experience at or advising companies in AI inference, model serving, GPU cloud, or developer infrastructure. - Working fluency in open-source software licensing and the legal mechanics of running a company alongside a community-driven open-source project. - Familiarity with the regulatory issues facing AI infrastructure companies, including data privacy, export controls on compute and models, and emerging AI-specific regulation. - Experience negotiating with hyperscalers, hardware vendors, and enterprise customers with demanding security, compliance, and data-handling requirements. - Track record of building lightweight self-service resources, templates, and playbooks so product, engineering, and go-to-market teams can move without waiting on legal. Bonus points if you have: - Served as first or sole in-house counsel, or as a senior lawyer with broad ownership, at an AI infrastructure company - Deep experience with open-source business models (open core, managed offerings, enterprise licensing, etc.) or companies that steward a major open-source project. - Handled the full generalist range at an early-stage startup: financings, equity and employment, immigration, and corporate governance. - Built strong working relationships with top law firms while keeping accountability and execution speed in-house. Logistics Location: San Francisco, CA (On-site / Hybrid). Will consider remote in the US for exceptional candidates. Compensation: Compensation determined based on background, skills, and experience. Offers include competitive base salary & meaningful equity. Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas on a case-by-case basis. Benefits: Inferact offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits as well as 401(k) company match. ## About Inferact ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Inferact is a startup founded by the creators of vLLM, the leading open-source LLM inference engine, dedicated to making AI inference cheaper and faster at global scale. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage; raised $150M in seed funding) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States (with a second office in Singapore) - **Founded**: 2025 - **Founders**: Simon Mo (CEO), Woosuk Kwon, Kaichao You (Chief Scientist), Roger Wang, Joseph Gonzalez, Ion Stoica ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: AI infrastructure / open-source inference engine for large language models - **Target customers**: AI labs, hyperscalers, startups, and enterprises deploying large-scale AI models (B2B, primarily technical teams) - **Mission**: Grow vLLM as the world’s AI inference engine and accelerate AI progress by making inference cheaper and faster. ## Products & Services - **vLLM (Open-Source Inference Engine)**: The core product – an open-source LLM inference engine that supports 500+ model architectures and runs on 200+ accelerator types. Inferact stewards and supercharges vLLM, with all optimizations flowing back to the community. - **Managed Inference Infrastructure (in development)**: Inferact is building infrastructure to absorb the complexity of deploying frontier models at scale, aiming to make it as simple as spinning up a serverless database. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company) - **Key Metric**: Total funding of $150M (seed round, announced 2026) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lightspeed Venture Partners (lead), Redpoint Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter Capital, Sequoia Capital, The House Fund, GC&H Investments, and others. Partnerships include NVIDIA, Red Hat, DigitalOcean, and Cohere. - **Growth Signals**: - $150M seed round – one of the largest seed rounds in AI infrastructure. - 22 employees with +27.3% monthly headcount growth. - vLLM ecosystem: 2,000+ contributors, 500+ model architectures, 200+ accelerator types. - Day-zero support for new model architectures (e.g., Cohere’s Command A+) and hardware integrations. - Active hiring with 5 open positions across inference, performance, kernel engineering, and cloud orchestration. ## Competitive Advantages - **Deep ecosystem moat**: vLLM is the de facto standard open-source inference engine, with a massive community and integrations across models and hardware that took years to build. - **Founding team credibility**: Creators and core maintainers of vLLM, with experience deploying at frontier scale (research and production). - **Hardware-software co-optimization**: Positioned at the intersection of model innovation and hardware diversity, enabling day-zero compatibility and performance optimizations. - **Open-source commitment**: All improvements flow back to vLLM, ensuring community trust and rapid adoption. ## Strategic Focus - **Current priorities**: Push vLLM performance further, deepen support for emerging model architectures (MoE, multimodal, agentic), expand hardware coverage (200+ accelerators), and build managed infrastructure to simplify deployment. - **Growth direction**: Close the capability gap between models and serving systems; absorb complexity so teams can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: High-caliber engineering team with roots in vLLM, PyTorch, and top AI labs. Emphasis on open-source contribution and cutting-edge inference research. - **Work policy**: Hybrid with a San Francisco HQ; at least one open role (Member of Technical Staff, Exceptional Generalist) is listed as Remote. - **Notable perks**: Opportunity to work at the frontier of AI inference, directly impact the open-source ecosystem, and collaborate with partners like NVIDIA, Red Hat, and major AI labs. - **Engineering culture**: Strong focus on systems engineering, kernel optimization, and cloud orchestration – ideal for engineers passionate about performance and infrastructure. ## Sources 1. [inferact.ai](https://inferact.ai/) 2. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/inferact) 3. [CB Insights](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/inferact) 4. [Sequoia Capital](https://sequoiacap.com/companies/inferact/) 5. [Ashby Jobs](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/inferact) ## Other roles at Inferact - [Founding Product Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-product-designer-inferact-san-francisco-8fhyc666jrb6) — San Francisco, CA - [IT Support & Operations Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/it-support-operations-engineer-inferact-san-francisco-jfknsmecptdj) — San Francisco, CA - [Inference Engineering, Co-op](https://feeny.ai/job/inference-engineering-co-op-inferact-san-francisco-zxysczbanr0y) — San Francisco, CA - [HR / People Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/hr-people-lead-inferact-san-francisco-qc5yjw670w1d) — San Francisco, CA - [Member of Technical Staff, Inference](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-inference-inferact-remote-ezb6x9bq2fty) - [Member of Technical Staff, Cloud Orchestration (Remote)](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-cloud-orchestration-remote-inferact-remote-pzza0bak1bw7) - [Member of Technical Staff, Cluster Administration](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-cluster-administration-inferact-san-francisco-hzy2pmhsv4ca) — San Francisco, CA - [Member of Technical Staff, Site Reliability Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-site-reliability-engineer-inferact-san-francisco-4hdd72zebn0b) — San Francisco, CA - [Head of Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-engineering-inferact-san-francisco-rhcv5bpns37j) — San Francisco, CA - [Product Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-manager-inferact-san-francisco-ap07axndjdjb) — San Francisco, CA