Commercial Counsel, Contract Infrastructure

Commercial Legal Infrastructure Architect

At finmid, we're building infrastructure that integrates access to capital for SMEs directly into the platforms they use daily. We leverage technology, data, and strategic partnerships to deliver financing solutions that significantly outperform traditional financial services, offering SMEs faster, simpler, and more transparent access to funding.

As we expand across Europe, the volume and complexity of our contracting grows in parallel: platform partnerships, borrower agreements, supplier procurement, and the regulatory wrapping that holds them together. Our stack combines regulated financial infrastructure with modern software engineering. Legal sits inside that stack rather than adjacent to it. This role is where commercial contracting, product enablement, and AI-driven workflow design meet.

The Role

Build the commercial legal infrastructure that lets finmid contract at the speed its product ships. You'll be the main legal point of contact for our commercial and product teams, the operator behind every platform, borrower, and supplier contract, and the architect of the systems that make this work repeatable. The goal: a contracting function that scales with revenue rather than with headcount.

You'll do this in close partnership with the General Counsel, the Head of Commercial, and product leads across Europe. You'll have a lot of autonomy, but you won't be on your own. This is a deeply cross-functional role and you'll be embedded with the people building, selling, and integrating the product.

The problems you'll work on don't have established playbooks yet. You'll need intellectual range: the ability to move between regulatory text, contract drafting, workflow design, and AI tooling without losing the thread.

What You Will Work On

• Commercial Contracting: Own finmid's contract stack end-to-end across platform-facing, borrower-facing, and supplier-facing agreements. Negotiate independently with counterparties once you've internalised our positions, redline against playbook, and bring back the genuinely hard calls for collective decision. The expectation isn't speed for its own sake. It's quality at volume, with the reasoning legible to anyone who needs to follow it.

• Product Enablement: Sit alongside product leads as new features take shape. Translate roadmap into legal frameworks: term sheets, customer-facing T&Cs, partner schedules, and the contractual scaffolding that lets a feature ship without rewriting the agreement every time a parameter changes. Design contracts that flex with the product rather than constrain it.

• Contract Management Infrastructure: Build the operating system for commercial legal at finmid. That means a redline review workflow that runs on AI assistance from first pass to negotiation, a clause library and playbook that update themselves as our positions evolve, automated propagation of T&C changes across jurisdictions and languages, version control that nobody has to babysit, and an internal knowledge layer that lets the next hire onboard in days rather than months.

• Procurement and Vendor Contracting: Run the negotiation of third-party supplier agreements, from cloud and data providers through to outsourced services. Hold the line on liability, IP, data, and exit terms, and make sure every vendor contract maps cleanly to the regulatory obligations it triggers downstream.

• Regulatory-Embedded Contracting: Make sure our commercial paper does the work our regulators expect of it. That includes DORA-grade resilience and ICT third-party requirements, GDPR and sub-processor architecture, outsourcing rules under EU and national supervisory regimes, and vendor risk standards that survive audit. Treat regulatory clauses as reusable components, not bespoke prose.

• AI and Tooling: Choose the stack. Claude, Noxtua, Legora, or whatever lands next. Run real experiments, switch off what doesn't work, and integrate what does into daily practice. The remit isn't to tinker. It's to compound leverage: every hour spent on tooling should return many hours of throughput across the team.

What Your First 3 Months Will Look Like

• Map finmid's full contract surface end-to-end. Identify where contracts collide, where standards drift across products and jurisdictions, and where manual work is silently absorbing your future capacity.

• Take over negotiation of at least one live commercial deal and one live procurement contract. Build your reference points by working the actual files, not by reading the archive.

• Stand up the first version of a playbook covering our top recurring positions. Make it readable, machine-friendly, and obviously useful to a non-lawyer reviewer.

• Get rid of at least one painful manual workflow and replace it with something that runs itself. Pick the candidate (redline triage, T&C version propagation, translation management) that's bleeding the most time and fix it.

• Get fluent with the AI tools the team is testing (Claude, Codex, Noxtua and the rest) so they're part of how you work, not something you're still evaluating.

• Come back to the team with a 12-month view of what the commercial legal function needs to become, and a clear opinion on sequencing.

What You Need To Be Successful (Requirements)

• Graduate of a top-tier EU, UK, or US law school, qualified or qualifying in a relevant jurisdiction.

• At least one year of experience in Big Law or in-house at a technology company, fintech, SaaS business, or financial institution. The shape of the experience matters more than the count of years.

• Direct exposure to commercial contract drafting and negotiation. You should be able to walk into a redline conversation and hold your ground on the substance.

• Bonus if you've worked on finance, regulated product, or any setting where commercial contracting has had to coexist with supervisory expectation.

Capabilities

• You think in systems. When you see a recurring contract problem, your instinct is to design a workflow that prevents it rather than to draft around it case by case.

• You think algorithmically. You can decompose a contracting process into decision trees, branching logic, and checkpoints, and you can explain that structure to a product manager or an engineer without translation loss.

• You treat contracts as product. You understand that a well-designed agreement is a reusable component, that clause libraries are infrastructure, and that the difference between a function handling 50 deals a quarter and one handling 500 is almost entirely a question of process design.

• You're practically curious about AI tooling and willing to get hands-on. In time, you'll develop a clear-eyed view of where current legal AI genuinely accelerates the work and where it quietly creates new failure modes.

• You hold the line on legal precision while staying commercially pragmatic. You know which positions are worth fighting for and which are tax on the deal.

• You write with precision: clauses, playbooks, internal guidance, and product specs that are unambiguous, implementation-ready, and short enough that someone will actually read them.

• You're comfortable working cross-functionally with product and engineering. You don't need to write code, but you should feel at home in a Linear ticket, a design review, or a roadmap conversation.

• You enjoy building from scratch. The state of the function on day one should look to you like an opportunity rather than a deficit.

• All the while, you maintain a high standard of quality across your outputs and are a trusted advisor to your internal counterparts.

Benefits

• Early commercial legal role with direct access to product, engineering, commercial, and the General Counsel across multiple European jurisdictions, with unusually broad exposure to how a regulated financial product is actually built, sold, and contracted, rather than one narrow slice of it.

• We see ourselves as "distributed first" (i.e. work from anywhere) but also have a beautiful office in Berlin where you can work.

• We are flexible and cover whatever you need to be as productive as possible.

• Home office stipend.

• 30 days time off.

• Meaningful equity.

• Open-minded and transparent culture that includes