Sr. Director of Commercial and Legal Affairs

Sr. Director of Commercial and Legal Affairs

About Backblaze

Backblaze is a public company that makes storing and using data astonishingly easy. When our founding team got together, they committed to helping people save their data. Today, the Backblaze Storage Cloud provides a foundational platform around the world for a broad community of developers, IT generalists, entrepreneurs, and individuals who seek the easy, affordable, trusted solutions we provide.

We have managed to nurture a team-oriented culture with amazingly low turnover. Our approach is guided by honesty, transparency, and a commitment to doing the right thing. Our customers are happy, and so are our coworkers: in the most recent “Great Place to Work” survey, 97% of our team rated Backblaze as “a great place to work.” Check out what our employees are saying on Glassdoor!

About the Role

We are seeking a Sr. Director of Commercial and Legal Affairs to lead and oversee Backblaze’s commercial, privacy, and product legal functions. This is a people leader role that will serve as a strategic business partner across Sales, Product, Engineering, Security, and Compliance.

The ideal candidate is a highly experienced commercial lawyer with a strong track record of drafting and negotiating complex technology transactions, including enterprise and strategic partnership deals. This role also requires fluency in privacy and data protection issues and hands-on experience advising product and engineering teams throughout the product lifecycle.

This position will play a critical role in enabling scalable growth while thoughtfully managing legal and regulatory risk as Backblaze continues to expand globally. This role includes people management responsibilities and will lead, mentor, and develop attorney(s) and legal professional(s) supporting commercial, privacy, and product work.

This role reports to the Head of Legal & Compliance and is fully remote (US-based).

What You’ll Do

Commercial Leadership and Deal Execution

• Lead the company’s commercial contracting function, serving as the primary legal owner for complex, high-value, and strategic transactions.

• Draft, review, and negotiate a wide range of sophisticated commercial agreements, including enterprise SaaS agreements, MSAs, SOWs, partnership and channel agreements, reseller agreements, professional services agreements, consulting agreements, and related technology transactions.

• Act as the senior escalation point for complex or high-risk negotiations, providing strategic guidance to Sales, Business Development, and executive stakeholders.

• Ensure commercial terms align with Backblaze’s business objectives, risk tolerance, and long-term growth strategy.

Privacy and Data Protection

• Provide practical, business-oriented legal advice on global privacy and data protection matters, including GDPR, CCPA, and other applicable data protection regimes.

• Oversee and support the development, negotiation, and maintenance of data protection agreements, privacy terms, and related contractual frameworks.

• Partner closely with Security, Compliance, and Product teams to assess privacy risk and ensure data protection obligations are integrated into business processes and products.

Product and AI Counseling

• Serve as a trusted legal advisor to Product and Engineering teams, advising on product design, feature development, and launches from inception through release.

• Counsel on issues related to data use, AI and machine learning, intellectual property, open source, and regulatory considerations impacting product development.

• Advise on the commercial, privacy, and contractual terms for AI features and AI-driven workloads, and help the business adopt AI responsibly and at speed.

• Help teams identify and mitigate legal risk while enabling innovation and speed.

Process, Playbooks, and Scale

• Lead the development and continuous improvement of commercial playbooks, templates, poli...