Senior Legal Counsel, (Commercial)
London
G&A – Legal /
Full-time /
Hybrid
Are you ready to power the World's connections?
About Kong:
Kong offers the leading API and service lifecycle management platform for modern software architectures. We power trillions of transactions daily for leading organizations through our end-to-end API platform. Our growing team of engineers and tech professionals work passionately to drive the future of API innovation and service control platforms to help our community and our customers stay at the forefront of technology and innovation. Kong is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by leading investors like Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures and Tiger Global.
About the role:
We are looking for an experienced commercial and generalist lawyer to join as an early member of Kong’s legal team, responsible for helping support Kong’s sales growth. In this role, you will be a trusted partner to the EMEA revenue teams. You will also have the opportunity to provide support to our APAC sales team until we have a legal team member in that region. You will draft, structure and negotiate customer contracts with some of the world’s biggest brands in financial services, technology, e-commerce and other industries. You will be called on to assess legal and business risks, make sound decisions, and provide advice on a broad range of issues in areas such as SaaS, privacy, security, alliances, open-source software and intellectual property, and assist with other issues as they come up. You will also partner with the wider Kong Legal team to address other corporate, compliance and other legal issues, and help develop scalable, global processes.
You will report to Kong’s Senior Director, Legal, EMEA and APAC, based in London, UK.
We can hire in London, Paris, Germany or UK Remote
What you will be doing:
- Serve as a trusted advisor and business partner to Kong’s EMEA sales team,
- Support our APAC sales team as needed
- Lead complex cross-border commercial transactions with sophisticated counterparties located across Europe and APAC
- Review, draft, and negotiate a wide variety of other commercial agreements
- Help ensure compliance with a variety of laws and regulations impacting our enterprise software and SaaS offerings, including intellectual property, privacy, security and government contracting
- Partner with Finance, Sales Ops and Deal Ops to support the end-to-end contract negotiation and close process
- Advise internal teams on legal matters and provide general commercial legal advice, as well as providing training and enablement to our growing Go to Market organization
- And any additional challenges and tasks to help support Kong’s growth
What you’ll bring:
- Law degree, and member in good standing in England and Wales, France or Sweden (international legal experience a huge plus)
- Minimum 4-6 years of experience practicing law both with a law firm and in-house (preferably with late-stage private and/or early-stage public technology companies)
- Demonstrated experience in negotiating and closing complex software and SaaS contracts with large, sophisticated customers
- Great judgment, and an ability to build and maintain strong professional relationships within the company, with customers, and others
- Working knowledge of intellectual property, data governance and privacy matters
- High professional and personal standards, and a commitment to inclusiveness
- Attention to detail and an ability to view legal issues within the context of business objectives
- A passion for team work and customer success - at Kong we win together and work as one Team
- A sense of humour!
What is a Konger?
We are a group of makers, thinkers, and doers focused on helping today’s developers build tomorrow’s technology.
Our teams work on the bleeding edge of API innovation to provide our users with a central nervous system for data and services.
We put design at the heart of everything we do, and we’re relentlessly focused on creating beautiful experiences for our customers.
That’s why technology companies, major banks, e-commerce innovators, and government agencies put Kong in front of their most important web applications.
We believe in the power of Open Source and everything it stands for. That’s why developers around the world enthusiastically contribute on top of our open-source platform.
We are passionate about solving challenges that will fundamentally shape the future of technology, and we’re looking for the right people to join us on our mission.
If you believe in taking ownership of your work, making an impact, and having fun along the way, we would love to talk to you.
