The posting
About this role
The Senior Manager, General Legal is a senior legal advisor to Carrier leaders responsible for strategic and national accounts, data center opportunities, and other complex commercial relationships. The role owns the legal strategy for sophisticated negotiations and develops scalable contracting frameworks that support growth while protecting approved commercial and operational assumptions.
Working closely with sales, account leadership, operations, finance, engineering, compliance, and other functions, the successful candidate will independently lead significant commercial matters, translate complex risks into practical options, and help senior stakeholders make informed decisions. This position reports to the Associate Director, General Legal and is part of the Climate Solutions Americas legal team.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Accounts and Commercial Transactions
- Serve as primary legal advisor for strategic and national accounts and other significant enterprise relationships, participating early in account planning, opportunity assessment, and transaction design.
- Lead the legal strategy, structuring, review, and negotiation of sophisticated B2B agreements, including master supply and services agreements, account frameworks, project agreements, statements of work, amendments, change orders, and channel arrangements.
- Design scalable frameworks for repeat business across projects, locations, business units, purchasers, affiliates, and channel partners, with clear boundaries for authorized purchasers, covered offerings, and transaction-specific obligations.
- Determine which commitments may be made at the account level and which require project-specific review, ensuring that pricing, capacity, schedule, performance, third-party, and financial obligations remain appropriately controlled.
Data Center Transactions
- Help lead legal support for data center opportunities and projects involving customers, contractors, developers, owners, integrators, and other project participants.
- Advise on project-specific risks, including scope, schedule and delay, liquidated damages, performance guarantees, service levels, testing and acceptance, change management, warranties, cybersecurity, flow-down obligations, supply-chain constraints, and third-party dependencies.
- Align contractual commitments with technical capabilities, execution plans, production and supply-chain constraints, and approved commercial assumptions.
Risk Advice and Cross-Functional Partnership
- Evaluate transactions from legal, financial, operational, and reputational perspectives; propose practical alternatives when customer terms or contracting models cannot reasonably be accepted.
- Advise on material commercial terms such as liability, indemnification, warranties and remedies, acceptance, termination, pricing adjustments, delivery, storage, title and risk of loss, assignment, third-party rights, and order of precedence.
- Translate complex issues into concise, business-oriented recommendations that enable executives and commercial leaders to make informed risk decisions.
- Partner with Finance, Operations, and relevant subject-matter experts on revenue recognition, order acceptance, production, shipment, storage, commissioning, compliance, tax, insurance, privacy, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and other specialized matters.
- Exercise independent judgment regarding escalation, acceptable fallback positions, and risks that can be addressed through negotiation, commercial controls, or alternative structures.
Contracting Operations and Capability Building
- Build trusted relationships with business leaders and establish clear approval pathways that support timely, well-informed decisions.
- Develop and improve templates, playbooks, issue lists, fallback positions, escalation criteria, and scalable contracting approaches for strategic accounts and data center transactions.
- Convert recurring issues and lessons learned into clearer guardrails, negotiation positions, business processes, and practical training for sales, account, operations, and other business teams.
Required Qualifications
- Juris Doctor (J.D.) from an accredited U.S. law school
- Active Bar admission to practice in at least one U.S. jurisdiction.
- 7+ years combined law firm or in-house corporate and commercial legal experience advising businesses on contract negotiation and transactional matters.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience supporting strategic, national, enterprise, or similarly complex customer accounts. Demonstrated ability to independently lead sophisticated B2B negotiations involving multiple internal and external stakeholders.
- Strong command of commercial contracting, transaction structuring, and risk allocation, with sound judgment regarding legal risk, commercial risk, operational constraints, and business decisions.
- Ability to communicate complex issues clearly to executives and non-lawyers and provide practical, actionable recommendations.
- Experience with data centers, mission-critical infrastructure, manufacturing, building systems, industrial products, technology, distribution, major construction, equipment projects, or similarly complex B2B transactions.
- Experience assessing and negotiating project-specific risks involving schedule, delay, performance, commissioning and acceptance, service levels, liquidated damages, and multi-party delivery structures.
- Consultative, strategic, collaborative, and solution-focused approach, with a demonstrated ability to develop practical alternatives rather than merely identify legal issues.
- Ability to work effectively with incomplete information, evolving business models, competing priorities, and time-sensitive commercial demands.
