Applied Computing was founded in 2024 to build Orbital, a physics-informed foundation model for energy operations. We’re live across oil and gas, refineries, and petrochemicals, working towards our mission: sustainable abundance for a growing planet.

The hydrocarbon industry keeps the world running. But its complexity has left operators tied to legacysystems, making critical decisions on less than 10% of available data. We built Orbital to change that. It’s a foundation model built specifically for energy that lets companies use AI at scale, harnessing all of their operational data and optimising in real time for any metric. Decisions getfaster, operations get safer, and carbon intensity falls.

We’ve raised over $32 million, including one of the largest seed rounds for an AI company in the UK. We’re just getting started.

The Role

This is a foundational role. As our first legal hire, you will own all legal matters across the business partnering closely with leadership, sales, product, people, and operations to enable fast, sustainable growth. Enterprise SaaS contracting is the core of the role. A significant portion of your focus will be supporting complex sales cycles and helping us close deals efficiently while managing risk.

Alongside that, you will own the corporate and employment stack: the supplier and partner contracts, the governance and company secretarial work, the employment and equity documentation. You will also build the legal infrastructure a scaling AI company needs. Breadth matters here more than depth in any one area; you will know when to handle something yourself and when to buy in specialist support.

Key Responsibilities

1) Enterprise SaaS & Commercial Contracts (Core Focus)

• Lead drafting, review, and negotiation of enterprise SaaS agreements, including MSAs, DPAs, SLAs,partnership agreements and security addenda

• Partner closely with sales and finance to support complex, high-value customer negotiations and shorten deal cycles

• Develop and maintain contract templates, fallback positions, and negotiation playbooks

• Advise on pricing structures, licensing models, and commercial risk allocation

2) Corporate Contracts, Governance & Company Secretarial

• Own the wider commercial contract stack: NDAs, supplier and vendor terms, reseller and channel agreements, consultancy and services agreements, IP assignments, and procurement

• Own company secretarial matters end to end: statutory registers, Companies House filings, board and shareholder resolutions, minutes, and the share register alongside Finance. This is currently outsourced; you will decide whether to bring it in-house

• Support certain board and investor matters: information rights, investor consents, board papers, and readiness for the next funding round

• Lead the legal workstream on fundraising and due diligence, and on any M&A, joint venture or strategic partnership structuring

• Support international expansion into further geographies, including entity setup, intercompany agreements, and working with Finance on transfer pricing documentation

3) Employment & People

• Oversee our suite of employment contracts, contractor and consultancy agreements, and offer documentation across UK and international hires

• Advise the People team on restructures, grievances and exits, including settlement agreements

• Provide guidance to the People team on employment policies and the handbook, keeping them current as UK employment law changes

• Advise on right to work, sponsorship, visa and immigration matters as we hire internationally

• Handle confidentiality, IP assignment and restrictive covenant provisions, which matter particularly for technical hires joining from competitors

4) Product, Data & AI

• Provide practical legal guidance on product development, particularly around AI features, data usage, and model deployment

• Set clear contractual positions on ownership and licensing of model weights: who owns pre-trained and fine-tuned weights, what rights customers acquire in models improved using their operational data and how weights and derivatives are treated on termination

• Draw and hold the line between training and inference in customer terms: what happens to customer inputs and outputs at inference time, retention and isolation commitments, and whether either may be used to improve the model

• Advise on ownership of model outputs, accuracy disclaimers, and IP and liability indemnities in safety-critical industrial settings

• Advise on UK and EU data protection laws (GDPR, UK GDPR) and support customer-facing privacy commitments

• Track the EU AI Act and emerging AI regulation, and advise on export controls as they apply to models, weights and technical data

• Help shape internal policies including responsible AI use and data governance

5) Building the Legal Function

• Establish scalable legal processes, tools, and documentation for rapid growth, which may include the use of legal-specific AI tools

• Define when and how to use external counsel across corporate, employment and specialist areas, and manage those relationships and budgets effectively

• Create internal guidance for commercial, product, people and operational teams

6) Risk & Compliance

Identify key legal and regulatory risks as the business scales

• Ensure compliance with applicable laws and industry standards

Essential Experience and Qualifications

• Qualified solicitor in England & Wales (or equivalent common law jurisdiction)

• 5–10 years’ PQE, ideally with a mix of top-tier law firm and in-house experience

• Strong experience in enterprise SaaS contracting (essential). Experience with AI companies is essential

• Practical corporate experience covering company secretarial, board and investor matters, and supporting fundraising or transactions

• Working knowledge of UK employment law, or a clear track record of picking up unfamiliar areas quickly with external counsel support

• Solid grounding in data protection and technology law, and a good understanding of export controls

• Comfortable engaging with how AI models are built and served: what model weights are, the difference between training and inference, and what fine-tuning on customer data changes. Enough to spot where the commercial and IP risk sits and translate it into contract terms. You do not need an ML background, but you do need to be able to hold the conversation with our engineers

• Experience working with high-growth startups is highly preferred

What Success Looks Like

• You will enable the commercial team to move quickly with a pragmatic approach

• You will build templates and process that help us scale quickly across commercial, corporate and employment matters

• Our corporate housekeeping and governance are clean and audit-ready ahead of the next raise, rather than reconstructed under time pressure

• Hiring and people matters move without legal becoming the bottleneck

• You will support the Chief Financial Officer and wider Leadership Team in managing key legal risks

across the business

Benefits

• Be the first legal hire with full ownership of the function

• Direct impact on revenue through enterprise deal support

• Genuine breadth across commercial, corporate, employment and AI regulation in a single role

• Work at the intersection of AI, data, and enterprise software

• Competitive salary, benefits and equity