Lead Legal Counsel

Cloover; Berlin; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

25 days vacation

Deutschlandticket (public transport)

Urban Sports Club (M)

Company discounts

Job summary

Cloover seeks an experienced General Counsel to define and lead all legal and regulatory work as the first in-house hire. You will drive licensing across European markets and own commercial terms, corporate governance, and risk management.

You will build the legal and compliance function from the ground up and report directly to the CEO/CFO, partnering with lenders and banks. You’ll be based in Berlin, collaborating with external counsel and the founders to shape strategy and ensure scalable,

Qualifications

• 8-10+ years in a regulated financial services environment (consumer credit, lending, payments or fintech), including time in-house.

Responsibilities

• Cover day-to-day legal work: commercial contracts, corporate questions, employment matters, governance, disputes, policies, and risk decisions.
• Own the contract estate: installer and partner agreements, customer terms, funding, receivables and lender documentation.
• Lead licensing, regulatory analysis and the workplan behind market expansion across Europe.
• Build the compliance, policy and governance suite from the ground up.

Job description

Your role

Cloover is the financial infrastructure behind Europe's energy transition. We finance residential solar, batteries and heat pumps through 500+ installers across five EU markets, moving around EUR 10M a month against EUR 1.2bn of committed funding.

Consumer credit is a regulated business, and Cloover is about to be regulated in more places. Today the licensing work, the installer contracts and every hard call sit with outside counsel and with the CEO's inbox. As our first legal and regulatory, you won't inherit an existing playbook, you will define how legal and regulatory work is done at Cloover and build the team behind it. You will drive market expansion and own high-impact regulatory work that directly determines which European markets we can enter, rather than basic compliance housekeeping. You will take ownership of both halves of the legal domain, obtaining regulatory licenses across new markets and owning the legal side of every contract we sign. You will be the foundational hire for the function, with your first legal analyst joining within 6 to 12 months.

You'll report to the CEO/CFO and work closely with institutional lenders, banks and complex financing structures.

Your mission

General counsel matters

• Cover the legal work Cloover needs day to day: commercial contracts, corporate questions, employment matters, governance, disputes, policies, and risk decisions.
• Own the contract estate: installer and partner agreements, customer terms, funding, receivables and lender documentation.
• Draft and negotiate directly, alongside the finance and commercial teams.
• Keep contract templates current and maintain an organized contract register.

Financial, regulatory and compliance

• Lead Cloover's financial and regulatory legal work across Europe and other markets: licensing route selection, applications, regulatory analysis, and the workplan behind it.
• Build the compliance, policy and governance suite from the ground up.
• Track consumer credit and financial services regulation as it moves, including CCD II in Germany, and translate these changes into actionable business operations.
• Be a credible counterpart for regulators, financing partners, banks and outside counsel.

External resources and team building

• Choose, instruct, and control outside counsel and advisors across markets. Set the scope, hold the budget, and judge output quality.
• Bring the answers back in-house rather than routing every question out.
• Hire and lead an analyst within 6 to 12 months, and build the legal and compliance function from there.

Your profile

• 8-10+ years in a regulated financial services environment (consumer credit, lending, payments or fintech), including time in-house rather than advisory work only.
• You have drafted and negotiated commercial contracts as the principal: you owned the redline, the fallback positions and the final call, with no supervising partner behind you.
• You have built regulatory frameworks yourself, not only advised on them. This includes policies you wrote, applications you assembled, and positions you defended to a regulator, auditor, or lender.
• You are able and willing to hold a named regulatory officeholder role where a regulator requires one. If you have held or been approved for one, tell us which role and in which jurisdiction.
• You are comfortable being the only lawyer in the room, and you say no in writing when it matters.
• Excellent written and spoken English, our working language.
• Based in Berlin and energized by being in the room. We're intentionally office-first: decisions get made in real time, prototypes get stress-tested over lunch, and the founding team is ten meters away. If that's how you thrive, you'll feel at home here.

Nice to have (but not required)

• Professional German (B2 or above), enough to work in German-language contracts and directly with German counsel and authorities.
• A legal qualification in an EU jurisdiction, England and Wales, or a comparable bar.

Don't meet every requirement?

We hire for potential and perspective. Credentials are a starting point, not a ceiling.

How We Hire

We keep things transparent and respect your time. Most go from first call to offer in under three weeks.

• Intro call (30 min): We want to understand what you're looking for, not just screen your CV.
• Hiring manager interview (30 min): We go deep into your experience, your thinking, and how you approach problems.
• Case study (1 hour): You get the brief in advance. We care about your approach, not whether you land on the right answer.
• Offer & signed contract.

Need any adjustments at any stage? Just let us know.

Why us?

• Performance pay. Strong base and a bonus tied to outcomes, recognised when it happens rather than locked behind annual cycles.
• AI-first & unthrottled. Unlimited enterprise-grade AI, no caps, no approval process. Every role, every team. The grunt work disappears so you can focus on what actually requires human judgement.
• Real ownership on a real mission. From day one you're shaping decisions that impact thousands of installers. We're not just building software. We're powering the energy transition across Europe.
• Grow faster than anywhere else. You'll work directly alongside the founding team and world-class investors. If you're building toward your own venture one day, there's no better room to be in.
• WHOOP Peak, covered. After six months with us, we cover your WHOOP Peak membership in full.
• The basics, done well. Prenzlauer Berg office with the latest Apple hardware. Free breakfast and dinner, stocked kitchen, regular team events, 25 days vacation, a fully covered Deutschlandticket, Urban Sports Club (M), and company discounts.

About Us

At Cloover, we're building the AI operating system for the energy transition — a platform that helps thousands of installation companies across Germany and Austria sell more, plan faster, and deliver better. We've secured $1.22B in total financing — including $1.2B in committed debt financing and a $22M Series A — and are just getting started on our European expansion.

We're a high-performance team that works with purpose. We own our work fully, debate ideas hard, commit together, and execute without hesitation. Seniority doesn't win arguments here — the best idea does. Speed isn't a deadline we hit — it's how we're wired.

And we're AI-first by default. We're not experimenting with AI — we're built on it. Tech ships faster because AI prototypes before we build. Sales closes more because outreach is personalized at scale. Finance stress-tests in real time. People & Culture builds processes in a fraction of the time. Whatever your function, AI is how we punch above our weight — and it's a skill you'll develop here faster than almost anywhere else.

We believe the energy transition belongs to everyone — and so does our team. We're international, driven, and deliberately inclusive. We hire for potential and perspective, and we welcome people of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences.

Sound like your kind of challenge?