The posting
ABOUT DOJO
Dojo started as a simple way for teachers to show parents what happened in class. Today it's used in 95% of US K-8 schools and by 1 in 4 American families, and reaches about 50 million kids in 180 countries. We got here with around 220 people and have never paid for a user.
Families trust us with their kids, and we're now building on that trust. On Dojo Islands, kids explore a shared world with their friends after school. Dojo Tutor connects families with tutors. Sparks is an AI tutor for every kid, and Login with Dojo will let children sign in safely anywhere online.
Our mission is to give every child on Earth an education they love. We hire for talent density, and many of our people came from Instagram, Netflix, Dropbox, Stripe, Uber and Y Combinator.
THE JOB
Every product above lives in a category whose rules haven't been written yet. State legislatures, the FTC and the EU are writing them right now. What should a shared online world for eight-year-olds allow? How should an AI talk to a child? Who verifies a kid's identity, and what happens to that data? Some company will answer these questions well, in public, and earn the trust of parents and schools for a generation. We want that company to be Dojo, and we want you to lead it.
As Head of Legal you'll sit on the leadership team and work directly with our co-founders. You'll own all of legal: product, privacy, commercial, corporate, employment, IP, regulatory and litigation. You'll inherit good foundations, including a small in-house team, trusted outside counsel and working commercial and privacy processes. Your job is to make them great.
We have strong views on how this should work. Trust is our moat, and the right Head of Legal makes it deeper every quarter while teams ship faster. The best legal answer is usually a version of yes with sensible guardrails, reached early, before anyone has spent months building the wrong thing. We also think AI now lets a small team of exceptional lawyers do what used to take fifteen. You'll get to prove it.
YOUR FIRST 18 MONTHS
Make Dojo the company parents trust most with their kids.
- Decide where Dojo stands on the hardest questions in kids' tech, and say it publicly before regulators decide for us: AI that talks to children, kids playing together online, and how products for kids should make money.
- Figure out which seals and certifications actually change a parent's or a district's mind, then win them.
- Make privacy one of the reasons districts pick Dojo.
- When a regulator calls, handle it so well that the product and our reputation come out unharmed.
Make legal the reason things ship faster.
- Get pulled into the room early by product, engineering and partnerships, because you make their plans better. Find the version that can ship, name the one or two real showstoppers, and tell the team what to do this week.
- Turn standard contracts in hours and product questions in two days.
- Write the playbooks that let district data agreements, partnerships and vendor deals close without starting from zero each time.
Build a legal team that outperforms teams five times its size.
- Lead and grow a small, very good in-house team, and hold outside counsel to budget and to your standard.
- Put AI into the daily work on contracts, data agreements and privacy reviews. Decide what comes in-house and what stays with specialists, so outside spend falls while quality rises.
- Own M&A, financing and board matters with our CFO, and keep the company ready to do a deal or a raise on short notice.
You will be a match if:
- You've led legal at a consumer tech company of 100 to 1,000 people, where product and engineering create most of the value.
- Product and business leaders who've worked with you say, unprompted, that you made them faster and found answers they hadn't seen. You end your advice with what you'd do, and once the call is made you own it.
- You've owned privacy for a consumer product, ideally one for kids, across COPPA, FERPA, state student privacy laws, CCPA/CPRA, GDPR and the new rules on AI. If your depth is narrower, you learn fast and already think about it clearly.
- You're comfortable running M&A, financings and board work alongside a CFO.
- You've led talent-dense teams and managed several outside firms to budget. You know the right specialist for almost any problem and can get them on the phone today.
- You've rebuilt legal work with AI yourself, and can explain concretely how three lawyers plus specialists can match fifteen.
- You turn a messy problem into the two or three decisions that matter, and you write short. You hold a position without starting a war, and you change your mind when the facts change, and you move decisions on trust rather than title.
- You move fast enough to make people slightly nervous, and you raise the bar on ambition as much as on rigor.
Bonus:
- 10+ years in law, ideally including child-directed products or student data.
- Time spent in strategy consulting, operating, finance or engineering.
- You've stepped into an existing legal function and made it markedly better, or led a distributed team.
- You can tell Dojo's story to a regulator, a reporter or a partner and leave them on our side.
You won't match every line here. If these problems make you want to start tomorrow, apply anyway. Some of our best people took unusual paths to get here.
WHY NOW
Very few legal jobs let you shape how a generation of kids experiences the internet. The questions are new, the stakes are real, and the answers you reach here will set norms far beyond Dojo. You'll have the scale to matter, a team small enough that your judgment shows up in everything, and founders who want a real partner on the hardest calls.
[1] Some more context:
(If you are on LinkedIn, you will not be able to access the hyperlinks below. Once you click apply, you will be directed to our career website (if you are not on there already) and will be able to access the hyperlinks)
- How ClassDojo Connects Parents, Students, and Teachers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XBnlzHpXTQ
- “Whats New on ClassDojo 2023 https://youtu.be/O8Tora5T7O4”
- TechCrunch Article: Second Act comes with First Profits https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/classdojos-second-act-comes-with-first-profits/
Click here https://www.classdojo.com/press/ if you're interested in learning more about what we've been up to.
We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. In accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. We are happy to accommodate any disabilities or special needs. We are a distributed company, so we hire regardless of location, as long as you are willing to have significant hours overlap with one of the Americas time zones.
ClassDojo takes a number of factors into consideration when determining compensation, including geographic location, experience, and skillset. Salary ranges (United States):
CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT states: $260,000.00 - $325,000 (USD)
All other states in the US: $220,000 - $275,000 (USD)
