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Head of Legal & Compliance / Founding Counsel

Founding counsel role owning commercial contracts, legal library, compliance, risk, provider flow-downs, and corporate matters.

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Team

Operations

Employment

Full-time

Location

European Union flagEurope

We are looking for an excellent business-minded legal professional to join Trinsic as an extension of the leadership team. Trinsic operates in a highly-regulated industry across many geographies where "legal" is a key pillar of the value we provide to customers. As the owner of something so core to our product and go-to-market, it's hard to overstate the impact you'll have.

Background

Humanity is editing genes, starting space tourism, and verging on artificial general intelligence. Meanwhile, identity verification is still done by taking pictures of plastic cards. We're building the infrastructure to bring online identity into this new age. Trust online is eroding faster and faster with AI, and digital identity is a critical layer for the next generation of the web.

We've built the first Identity Acceptance Network, the "Visa for ID." We enable our customers to accept digital IDs that users already have, such as mobile driver's licenses, BankIDs, and reusable IDs. Compared with taking a picture of a plastic ID for verification, our customers can verify users 10x faster and reduce fraud. We've integrated 80+ networks across 50+ countries covering 1,500M+ people.

Job descriptions don't tend to be very helpful. Here are the things you probably care about:

  • You'll be a one-person legal department. You'll join a team where your manager (the CEO, who is writing this 👋) cares deeply about this function & understands the problem space well. We optimize for talent density—the minimum number of maximally impactful people. You'll work directly with Sales, Product, Security, Ops, customers, provider partners, and outside counsel.

  • You'll be employee #10 at a high-intensity, fast-growth company our customers depend on in a rapidly-shifting $200B industry that impacts billions of people. We're attempting to solve one of the only remaining truly unsolved problems on the web and we've found a wedge to actually do it.

  • Everybody on the team is smart and down-to-earth. We don't hire anyone with a history of being a jerk (we check references). We have the beginnings of a cool company culture that you'll contribute to.

  • You won't be micromanaged. You'll be given objectives, context, and a supportive team, and expected to take ownership & be accountable for results.

  • We're a remote company, and we lean into that. For example, we do a lot of asynchronous work through writing, messaging, etc. We travel twice yearly to get together for team meet-ups.

  • There are things that are broken, fires burning, etc. (we don't expect you to be perfect either). We expect you to bring a "let's figure this out" mentality to solving problems.

We try to only hire people who will do the work of their lives at Trinsic. We care about:

  • Like all Trinsineers, your identity at Trinsic will be as a member of the team first, lawyer second. Some companies view legal as a drag or impediment. Trinsic is different—for us, legal & compliance are key growth accelerants. You must exemplify this mindset.

  • At least 5-7 years of experience practicing law. (Happy to consider fewer years of experience for exceptional people.) Meaningful experience with commercial contracts, data protection (GDPR), and international compliance experience are required; ideally in a product/customer context rather than only as abstract legal research. Experience as in-house counsel is a requirement.

  • You historically get more work done per unit of time than your peers.

  • You will need to discern how to embrace AI to the maximum responsible degree. Good judgment here to balance actual risk, task efficiency, automation, etc. is critical.

  • Excellent command of the English language, particularly in written form, required. Bonus if you are pedantic and precise with terminology, punctuation, formatting, etc.

  • Highly driven disposition, self-motivation, comfort taking action in ambiguity. You enjoy being a problem solver who can be resourceful to find answers to complex regulatory questions. You automatically take the extra step (e.g. creating the internal compliance register instead of throwing it over the wall).

  • This role requires a "nothing is beneath me" mentality. You'll handle everything from NDAs to complex international compliance strategies and high-stakes negotiations. You'll also implicitly be a leader in the company.

  • You should be comfortable managing people, both internal and external, including setting high expectations, holding accountable, and following through. We currently have 4 external law firms we're using consistently, and local counsel in various countries.

  • You'll be expected to be very smart about our industry and product quickly; and how the product relates to a myriad of regulations in various countries.

  • Experience as counsel to venture-backed, early-stage startups is a bonus (e.g. financing, M&A, general corporate matters).

  • You should feel confident you'll move the needle for whichever company you join—and therefore be excited about above-market equity as part of a competitive comp package.

Here is what we need from you:

  • Legal product operations - Your mandate will be to create and maintain a legal infrastructure and compliance strategy that accelerates our growth by streamlining the administrative side of contract amendments, flow-down terms, and so forth

  • Commercial contract negotiation - Lead all customer MSA negotiations and partner agreements, reducing friction in our sales cycle while protecting our interests

  • Legal library development - Draft and maintain Trinsic's template agreements and briefs outlining our fit with key regulations around the world, including provider flow-downs and customer-facing compliance explanations

  • Internal compliance - Manage data privacy/GDPR compliance, SOC2, ISO27001 readiness, and matters related to our subsidiaries in other countries

  • Risk management - Establish processes for tracking subprocessors, maintaining disclosures, vendor diligence, contract obligations, and similar

  • General corporate matters - Support board meetings, fundraising events, and other corporate governance requirements as needed

We're an equal opportunity employer and value people from a variety of walks of life.

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