Transaction Principal, EU

About the company

The company’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

Data Center Transaction Principal, Europe

About the role

As a Transaction Principal for Europe at the company, you'll drive the commercial sourcing and transaction execution process for our European data center capacity deals. You'll lead RFP processes, negotiate term sheets, and serve as the central leader ensuring seamless stakeholder alignment from initial sourcing through lease execution.

This role is critical to securing the infrastructure that powers the company's frontier AI systems across Europe — you'll bridge commercial negotiations with complex internal coordination across legal, finance, engineering, and network teams, and partner closely with our Compute Markets team who own the Europe market strategy and government relationships. This is not an established leasing org; you'll be building process alongside execution, and doing so across multiple countries with distinct regulatory, power, and development dynamics.

Responsibilities

• Lead the RFP and commercial sourcing process for European data center deals, managing developer outreach, proposal evaluation, and competitive selection across multiple markets

• Negotiate term sheets and manage the LOI process, structuring commercial terms that meet the company's technical and business requirements while maintaining strong developer partnerships

• Create the bridge from LOI to executed transaction, ensuring all commercial, technical, and legal requirements are satisfied for deal closure

• Serve as project manager for cross-functional stakeholder engagement — coordinating due diligence teams, internal and external legal counsel, network organization, platform engineers, and finance to ensure alignment prior to lease execution

• Act as the single point of contact for auxiliary organizations including networks, deployments, and government relations, providing regular updates on transaction progress and leasing status

• Develop and maintain transaction timelines, tracking critical-path items and proactively identifying risks that could impact deal closure

• Ensure all stakeholder requirements are captured and addressed in commercial agreements, translating technical and operational needs into contractual terms

• Manage complex digital infrastructure development activities to a construction-ready state, through a developer or directly

• Marry the right projects, capital stacks, and developers at the right stages

• Navigate country-specific permitting, grid connection, and regulatory requirements that vary significantly across European markets

• Document and refine transaction processes and playbooks to enable scalable deal execution as the company expands its infrastructure footprint across the region

• Partner with the Compute Markets Manager to prioritize markets, sites, and counterparties, and feed deal learnings back into Europe market strategy

You may be a good fit if you

• Have 10+ years of experience in transaction management, commercial real estate, data center leasing, or infrastructure procurement

• Possess a proven track record of managing complex, multi-stakeholder transactions from sourcing through execution

• Have strong negotiation skills with experience structuring term sheets, LOIs, and commercial agreements

• Excel at project management and can coordinate across legal, technical, finance, and operational teams simultaneously

• Have experience with RFP processes and competitive sourcing for large-scale infrastructure or real estate transactions

• Have experience working in or across European markets, with knowledge of the regional data center and development landscape — including established FLAP-D hubs and emerging markets like the Nordics and Southern Europe

• Are comfortable operating across multiple countries with different legal frameworks, languages, and business cultures

• Are highly organized with strong attention to detail while maintaining focus on strategic deal objectives

• Can operate effectively in fast-paced, ambiguous environments where processes are being built alongside execution

• Demonstrate exceptional communication skills and can coordinate effectively across time zones with US-based HQ teams and distributed European partners

It's a bonus if you

• Have experience with data center or hyperscale infrastructure transactions specifically

• Come from the development side of the industry rather than traditional brokerage/leasing — you understand how DC development works and how value is created (yield-on-cost, cap rates, development fees)

• Understand technical requirements for AI/ML workloads including power density, cooling, and network connectivity

• Have worked with legal teams on complex lease negotiations or infrastructure agreements across multiple European jurisdictions

• Understand utility coordination, power procurement, or energy considerations in data center transactions, particularly in the European context (fragmented national power markets, grid connection queues, renewable PPAs, sustainability and efficiency regulations)

• Have familiarity with data sovereignty and regulatory considerations that influence European site selection

• Have relationships within the European data center developer, operator, and broker ecosystem

• Have a background in corporate development, strategic partnerships, or infrastructure investment

• Have experience in high-growth technology companies managing infrastructure expansion

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary

£1 — £1 GBP

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study:  A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship:  We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

For roles performing work in California: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records or criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed.  Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that the company recruiters only contact you from [link for members] email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of the company. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate the company recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit  the company  directly for confirmed position openings.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At the company we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to the company, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

The company is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage:  Learn about  our policy for using AI in our application process.