Senior Legal Counsel

Paddle; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Paddle is seeking a Senior Legal Counsel to join our global legal and compliance team. You will lead cross-functional legal initiatives, advise on regulatory and data protection matters, and negotiate high-stakes contracts to support a fast-growing MoR business. The role will be UK-based with global scope.

You will collaborate across teams, mentor junior lawyers, and translate complex legal concepts into practical commercial guidance in a dynamic tech environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of legal experience, including 3+ years in-house at a regulated high-growth tech scale-up.
• UK-qualified solicitor or qualified in another common law jurisdiction.
• Excellent communicator with experience partnering across business units.

Responsibilities

• Leadership remit: work as part of a small team of lawyers, supervising in-house trainee lawyers.
• Strategic commercial work: negotiate strategic supplier and customer contracts.
• Strategic corporate work: negotiate strategic corporate financing agreements.
• Regulatory advice: lead on evolving rules, data protection, privacy policies, and related contracts.

Skills

Legal leadership

Regulatory analysis

Contract negotiations

Cross-functional collaboration

Data protection

Strategic thinking

Effective communication

Mentoring juniors

Education

UK qualified solicitor

Job description

What do we do?

Paddle offers digital product companies a completely different approach to their payment infrastructure. Instead of assembling and maintaining a complex stack of payments-related apps and services, we’re a Merchant of Record for our customers. That means we take away 100% of the pain of payment fragmentation. It’s faster, safer, cheaper, and, above all, way better. We’re backed by investors including KKR, FTV Capital, Kindred, Notion, and 83North and serve over 10,000 software sellers in 245 territories globally.

The role

As Senior Legal Counsel, you will be a senior member of the Paddle legal and compliance team, reporting directly to Paddle’s Director of Legal. The Paddle legal team is well-respected and integrated into Paddle’s business. As a result, this role will require you to collaborate with other teams across the business, and advise cross-functionally, always with a view to empowering the business to achieve its goals while taking a long-term strategic view. The role itself will be broad and varied, with a core regulatory element. You will be delivering first-rate legal advice in a fast-paced dynamic environment, identifying risk and balancing common sense with your legal expertise. You will be an excellent generalist, comfortable operating in areas of ambiguity. As Senior Legal Counsel, you will consider the longer-term impacts whilst also being able to react quickly to deliver level-headed, creative and context-appropriate solutions to ensure the best possible customer experience in the ever changing tech space. The role will be based in the UK but will be global in scope.

What you'll do

• Leadership remit – As a senior member of the team, you will work as part of a small team of lawyers in a wide range of legal work, including corporate and governance matters, administration of Paddle’s international branches and subsidiaries, negotiating commercial agreements, regulatory research and advising our product and support teams. Your duties may include supervising in-house trainee lawyers seeking their SRA qualification.
• Strategic commercial work – You will assist in the negotiation of strategic commercial contracts, including key supplier and customer agreements.
• Strategic corporate work – You will assist with the negotiation of strategic corporate contracts, including financing agreements.
• Regulatory advice (incl data protection) – You will lead on the identification and analysis of evolving rules and consumer regulations relevant to Paddle’s global MoR business model. You will collaborate with the compliance function to develop and implement risk and compliance policies and procedures relevant to Paddle’s operations and the MoR business model. You will draft, negotiate, and advise on data protection agreements, terms of service, privacy policies, and other privacy‑and data‑related contracts and disclosures, collaborating closely with the compliance function.

Everyone is welcome at Paddle

At Paddle, we’re committed to removing invisible barriers, both for our customers and within our own teams. We recognise and celebrate that every Paddler is unique and we welcome every individual perspective. As an inclusive employer, we don’t care if, or where, you studied, what you look like or where you’re from. We’re more interested in your craft, curiosity, passion for learning and what you’ll add to our culture. We’re committed to building a diverse team where everyone feels safe to be their authentic self. Let’s grow together.

Why you’ll love working at Paddle

We’re a diverse, growing group of Paddlers who pride ourselves on our transparent, collaborative and respectful culture.

We live and breathe our values, which are:

• Paddle Together – “None of us, is as smart as all of us”
• Paddle Simply – “Simple can be harder than complex: you have to get your thinking clean to make it simple”
• Paddle for others – “We can realise our wildest dreams, so long as we help enough other people to realise theirs”

We offer a full suite of benefits, including attractive salaries, stock options, unlimited holidays, enhanced parental leave, retirement plans, private healthcare and well-being initiatives.

We invest in learning and will help you with your personal development via constant exposure to new challenges, an annual learning fund, and regular internal and external training.

Connecting at Paddle

We’re a ‘digital-first’ company, which means our Paddlers always have the freedom to choose where, when and how they work within our hub locations.

We recognize that where our Paddlers do their best work is unique to them and we provide trust and autonomy for everyone to work in a way which fits them best. We also value the power of connection and have invested in global hubs which help local communities flourish and bring us together for focused collaboration.

Our Paddle hubs

In Europe: UK (London headquarters), Portugal (Lisbon hub), Netherlands and Ireland (Dublin hub)

In North America: Austin, TX (USA) and Toronto (Canada)

In APAC: Singapore

Our hub philosophy creates an engaging experience for all Paddlers, wherever, whenever and however we choose to work.

To support this, we focus hiring within our hubs and will always openly share the available locations for each open position on our job description.

Qualifications

• You have a minimum of 8+ years of legal experience, with at least 3 years in-house at a regulated high-growth tech scale-up preferably in payments, FinTech, SaaS or related sectors.
• You are a UK-qualified solicitor (preferably) or qualified in another common law or European jurisdiction.
• You enjoy leading and working with junior team members, helping them to grow and realise their potential.
• You are smart, curious, keen to learn and have a proven ability to quickly get across new and complex legal concepts.
• You are used to working from first principles, applying common sense, and excited about answering questions you have never dealt with before.
• You are an excellent and persuasive communicator used to partnering with a range of stakeholders across the business and externally.
• You are skilled at tailoring your legal advice to the recipient, whether they be senior management or a junior contributor.
• You are commercially‑minded and able to deliver creative, helpful and practical solutions to a rapidly growing business, often operating under pressure and in an area characterized by ambiguity.