Director of Legal Affairs

ABOUT ENDURANCE

Endurance is building the world's first modular subsea geothermal power plants, converting vast thermal resources under the ocean into gigawatts of baseload power. Backed by Founders Fund, Felicis, First Round Capital, and Point72 Ventures, our founding team includes veterans from SpaceX, Helion, Blue Origin, and Apple. We have completed multiple deep-ocean deployments to subsea volcanoes and are launching a long-term demonstration project this fall. By leveraging modular design, manufacturing scale, efficient drilling, and latent cooling on the seafloor, we are pioneering a new category of energy that outperforms traditional sources on environmental impact, deployment speed, and cost.

What you'll be doing

As Director of Legal Affairs, you will be Endurance's first in-house lawyer. You will report to our COO and work directly with the executive team on the agreements, structures, and decisions that take us from first-of-a-kind hardware to commercial power plants.

Our legal work has grown fast. In a normal week we are negotiating power offtake agreements, closing supply and equipment contracts for major assets, working offshore lease applications, standing up project companies around the world, and supporting a venture-backed hardware startup. Today that work is spread across the executive team and several outside firms. Your job is to pull it in, do most of it yourself, and make it faster, cheaper, and better. You will know when a matter needs a specialist, pick the right firm, scope the work, and hold the budget.

This is a critical position. Your judgment directly affects what we sign, how fast we move, and how much risk we carry into our first commercial projects.

Key Responsibilities

- Draft, negotiate, and own commercial agreements: NDAs, MOUs, LOIs, term sheets, and power purchase and offtake agreements

- Make sure non-binding documents stay non-binding, and that nothing we sign commits the company to terms it can't deliver

- Own supply chain and procurement contracts: supply agreements, statements of work, major equipment purchases (vessels, ROVs, subsea cables), and our standard purchase terms

- Build our contract templates, negotiation playbooks, signature authority rules, and a single system of record for every agreement we sign

- Manage outside counsel across corporate, energy, regulatory, tax, IP, and trade matters: scope each matter, set budgets and fee structures, and consolidate firms where it makes sense

- Support equity and debt financings with our corporate counsel, including data room and diligence responses, board consents, and equity grants

- Run corporate governance and entity management for the parent company and its project companies, in the US and abroad

- Work with External Affairs and outside counsel on federal offshore leasing, project company formation, and international project agreements

- Stand up our compliance programs for export controls (EAR/ITAR), sanctions screening, and anti-corruption (FCPA) ahead of international project agreements

- Advise our People team on employment matters: offer letters, contractor and consulting agreements, the handbook and policies, separations, and multi-state and international hiring

- Manage our IP portfolio with outside counsel, including trademarks, patent strategy, and IP terms in commercial and supply agreements

- Review real estate leases, insurance programs, and vendor agreements as we scale our facilities

- Train the team on what they can sign, when to bring in legal, and how to spot issues early

Qualifications

- Active bar membership in good standing in at least one US state, and eligible to register as in-house counsel in Washington

- 8+ years of directly applicable experience

- Extensive experience drafting and directly negotiating complex commercial agreements

- Experience in energy, infrastructure, industrial, or hardware businesses

- Proven ability to manage outside counsel to a budget, in