Senior Legal Counsel

Paddle; United States; Hybrid; USD 135,000 - 202,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Unlimited holidays

Enhanced parental leave

Retirement plans

Private healthcare

Well-being initiatives

Annual learning fund

Job summary

Paddle, a global payments technology company, seeks a Senior Legal Counsel to lead corporate, regulatory, and privacy matters across a fast-paced MoR business. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, supervise junior lawyers, and shape risk-aware strategies in a scale-up environment.

Based in the UK with global scope, you will negotiate strategic contracts, advise on data protection, and help build compliant policies while sustaining business growth in software and payments.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of legal experience with at least 3 years in-house at a regulated high-growth tech scale-up.
• UK-qualified solicitor or qualified in another common law or European jurisdiction.
• Experience leading junior lawyers and advising cross-functionally.
• Strong communication and commercial mindset.

Responsibilities

• Lead as a senior member of the legal team across corporate, governance, regulatory, and privacy matters.
• Negotiate strategic commercial contracts with suppliers and customers.
• Draft and negotiate data Protection agreements, privacy policies, and terms of service.
• Provide regulatory research and implement risk and compliance policies.

Skills

Legal experience

In-house counsel

Regulatory compliance

Data protection

Contract negotiation

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:

You will support the Director of Legal in their duties and advise and partner with every team from across the business on a wide range of matters, including the following:

• 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.

We're looking for you if you have:

• 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.

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.

Please let us know if there’s anything we can do to better support you through the application process and in the workplace. We will do everything we can to support any accommodations needed. 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:

• attractive salaries
• stock options
• unlimited holidays
• enhanced parental leave
• retirement plans
• private healthcare
• 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.