Amy Sennett – Karat

Founded with a mission to unlock opportunity for technical talent, Karat has become the world’s largest Interviewing Cloud, helping global financial institutions and leading tech companies raise the quality of their workforce. By combining human expertise with AI-enabled technology, Karat offers predictive, fair, and scalable solutions for technical assessments.

Amy Sennett | Karat | SVP & General Counsel

As Karat continues to expand and incorporate AI-driven capabilities into its platform, the legal landscape around privacy, security, and ethical deployment grows more complex. At the center of this evolution is SVP & General Counsel Amy Sennett, who has played a pivotal role in guiding Karat through rapid technological change while safeguarding its values.

“My role isn’t just to make sure we’re compliant,” she explains. “It’s about paving the way for innovation to move forward both rapidly and responsibly.”

A full-stack GC

Sennett’s career reflects a blend of ambition, curiosity, and adaptability. With degrees from Princeton and both Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, she has worked in law firms, startups, and global companies. That breadth of experience has made her a versatile generalist—a “full-stack GC,” as she calls it.

Her portfolio at Karat spans legal, privacy, compliance, business development, and, more recently, information security and IT. She also advises the CEO and board, helps the sales team negotiate contracts with enterprise customers, and supports the people function for Karat’s global workforce. It is a range that requires both attention to detail and strategic prioritization.

“At heart I’m a generalist, more than a specialist,” she says. “I like moving fast and making an impact—it’s less about writing the perfect memo and more about helping the business achieve its goals.”

That generalist mindset has proven invaluable at Karat, a company of about 150 employees where lawyers cannot afford to operate in silos. Her small but dedicated team—comprising two other lawyers and professionals in IT and information security—works closely with sales, engineering, and product teams. Together, they help maintain enterprise-level privacy and security standards while ensuring her colleagues can continue to innovate on Karat’s product offering.

Privacy has been a particular focus. Karat processes vast amounts of candidate data, including video interviews and assessment materials, which raises regulatory challenges across multiple jurisdictions. From China’s strict data regulations to Brazil’s privacy laws and evolving U.S. state requirements, Sennett has helped Karat develop frameworks to stay ahead.

“Being a good steward of the personal information we handle is critical,” she notes. “Our customers set a high bar for governance, and we need to exceed it.”

AI as a legal & strategic imperative

In recent years, AI has become the defining challenge—and opportunity—of Sennett’s role. At Karat, AI is being deployed to summarize interviews, generate transcripts, and provide query functions that allow hiring managers to drill down into candidate performance. These capabilities save time and improve consistency, but they also pose risks around accuracy, bias, and data security.

“AI has truly exploded as the dominant theme running through my day,” she says. “From governance frameworks for our product and engineering teams to evaluating AI tools used across marketing, sales, and HR, it touches so much of my work.”

The speed of AI development presents a dilemma. Technology often outpaces legal frameworks, leaving lawyers to interpret risks with limited precedent. Sennett approaches this with humility and persistence.

“You have to roll up your sleeves, ask the so-called ‘stupid questions,’ and figure out how to assess risks when the law hasn’t caught up yet,” she explains.

Her philosophy is not to be the “department of no.” Instead, she encourages collaboration with business leaders to identify responsible uses of AI. Recently, she tasked her IT and security teams with creating an “AI Toolkit” for Karat employees. This suite of enterprise-approved tools—ranging from AI note-takers to email summarizers—ensures that employees can adopt AI productively while safeguarding sensitive data.

“If you say no to AI across the board, people will use it anyway,” she warns. “Our role is to sit side by side with teams and help them choose the right options.”

Her approach mirrors the evolution of privacy law in the last decade. Just as lawyers had to become experts in global privacy regimes, today they must quickly understand the mechanics and risks of AI. For Sennett, AI governance is both a compliance responsibility and a cultural shift: “We’re all being asked to do more with fewer resources, and the efficiency to be gained from AI is no longer optional.”

Leading through acquisition

One of Sennett’s most significant contributions has been guiding Karat through the acquisition of a European AI company that now forms the backbone of its AI-enabled features. The acquisition positioned Karat to compete more effectively in an environment where AI-driven hiring tools are proliferating. By embedding AI responsibly into its Interviewing Cloud, the company can deliver new functionality to its users while maintaining its reputation as a trusted partner.

The acquisition was not just a product milestone for Karat —it was also a legal and regulatory challenge for Sennett. She had to coordinate closely with product, finance and HR executives at Karat to structure the transaction in a way that both satisfied the sellers and maximized Karat’s return on the investment. Leveraging a very lean team of corporate counsel and European experts, she had to ensure that Karat closed the deal quickly without excessive time or expense, while still ensuring that Karat was not exposing itself to new, unexpected IP and or AI risk by acquiring the technology on the table.

“It wasn’t just about speed or efficiency,” she explains. “We had to strike the right balance between moving the deal forward quickly and ensuring we were thorough—completing the diligence and upholding the standards our enterprise customers expect for data security and product integrity.”

Collaboration, growth & future aspirations

Collaboration has been a consistent theme in Sennett’s career. Early on, she gained leadership exposure working on the Boston 2024 Olympic bid, a fast-paced, startup-like environment where she learned to juggle both legal and strategic communications responsibilities. That experience required coordination with a diverse range of community organizers, local academics, business leaders and sports figures, among many other constituencies.

At Karat, collaboration extends beyond the legal function. She oversees not only legal and privacy but also information security and IT—functions that must partner successfully with customer-facing colleagues. Her role has even expanded into leading Karat’s partner strategy, which involves building relationships with other players in the technical workforce ecosystem, designing novel commercial and contracting frameworks, and creating new go-to-market motions at Karat.

This expansion of responsibilities reflects a broader trend for general counsels at private tech companies. As growth expectations have shifted and IPO timelines have stalled, GCs are often asked to take on adjacent functions. For Sennett, this has been both a challenge and an opportunity to demonstrate business acumen.

“If you’re genuinely curious and understand the drivers of the business, you unlock new professional opportunities,” she says.

Outside of work, Sennett is an avid runner who has completed 46 marathons, often using her races to fundraise for charitable organizations like World Central Kitchen and victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. She sees running as a metaphor for resilience and persistence—qualities that also define her legal career.

“When you’re out there on the same course as elite runners, you realize it’s about endurance, not perfection,” she reflects. “That mindset carries over into how I approach challenges at work.”