Senior Legal Counsel

1. Purpose of the role

To act as a senior commercial and corporate lawyer within Shufti's Legal, Compliance & Privacy department, taking day-to-day ownership of contract negotiation, corporate legal matters and legal risk across Shufti's global business. The role works closely with the Head of Legal, Compliance & Privacy to build out the commercial legal function, reduce turnaround time on customer and vendor agreements, and act as a trusted legal partner to Sales, Product and the executive team.

The role is expected to operate with a high degree of autonomy — running contract negotiations end-to-end, escalating only where genuinely novel or high-risk, and contributing to the design of playbooks, templates and processes that let the function scale.

2. Key responsibilities

Commercial & corporate legal

• Draft, review and negotiate MSAs, DPAs, NDAs, customer and vendor agreements, and other commercial contracts, balancing legal risk against commercial pace.

• Own and maintain the contract repository, standard templates and negotiation playbooks (NDA, customer, vendor, DPA); drive consistent use across the business.

• Advise Sales and Product on deal structuring, contractual risk and commercial terms; support pricing and packaging discussions where legal input is needed.

• Support corporate governance and company-secretarial matters, and assist with fundraising, M&A or other strategic transactions, including coordinating external counsel where required.

• Support employment/ER matters and help manage disputes as they arise.

Compliance & regulatory support

• Partner with Compliance & Regulatory Affairs on contractual controls (e.g. DPAs, security schedules, regulatory clauses) and on responses to enterprise DDQs / RFIs / RFPs / security questionnaires.

• Track legal and regulatory developments relevant to commercial contracting (e.g. AI Act, DORA, NIS2) and flag implications for templates and playbooks.

Privacy & data protection

• Work with the Privacy & Data Protection team to ensure contracts reflect current data-protection requirements (SCC/IDTA, vendor DPAs, international transfers).

Legal operations

• Keep contract intake, registers and turnaround-time tracking current; contribute to the department's KPI reporting.

• Identify opportunities to improve legal operations — self-serve tools, template automation, faster turnaround.

3. How the role is measured

Performance is measured against the department's legal KPIs, once the underlying registers/systems are live (development goal until then):

• Contract turnaround time

• Review quality / rework rate

• Renewal capture rate

• Contract governance & control adherence

• Legal risk and disputes / cost outcomes

4. Person specification

Essential

• Qualified lawyer with several years' post-qualification experience, ideally including in-house time in a regulated, multi-jurisdiction environment.

• Strong commercial contracting experience — drafting and negotiating MSAs, DPAs, NDAs and vendor/customer agreements.

• Working knowledge of corporate governance / company-secretarial matters.

• Comfortable operating autonomously and negotiating directly with counterparties and internal stakeholders.

• Clear, pragmatic communicator — an enabler to the business, not a blocker.

• Strong organisational skills; able to manage a high volume of concurrent contracts and deadlines.

Desirable

• RegTech / fintech / identity-verification domain exposure.

• Exposure to data protection (GDPR/ICO) and AML/compliance concepts.

• Experience supporting fundraising or M&A transactions.

• Additional qualification or jurisdiction (e.g. dual-qualified).