The posting
Build Conveo's legal function from the ground up, and be the partner our leadership team relies on as we scale.
Conveo is a Y Combinator-backed company in an active growth period. We started this year as a team of ~20 and are on track to reach ~125 people by year end. The people who join now have an outsized chance to shape how this company is built.
We raised a $50M Series A led by DST Global, Balderton, and Visionaries, giving us the fuel to move even faster. We're investing in our product, growing an exceptional team, and taking on bigger challenges as we enter our next stage of growth.
WHAT WE'RE BUILDING
Conveo is the AI research platform enabling fast, affordable, and high-quality consumer and B2B research. Global brands like Unilever, Google, and Orange use our AI video interviewer to generate insights across marketing and product teams.
Traditional research is slow, expensive, and superficial. Running it well requires expertise most teams don't have. That gap affects how well companies understand their customers and how well they can serve them. We're closing it.
THE ROLE
As our first Head of Legal, you'll build Conveo's legal function from the ground up. Strategically critical commercial agreements with enterprise clients and reseller partners are coming in, and they require sharp commercial and legal review to protect our revenue lines. You will advise on a broad array of legal topics across commercial, product, IP, employment and corporate matters, with the support of external advisors and tools where appropriate.
This is a partnership role. You'll report to our CFO and work hand in hand with them, with a strong dotted line to our CEO. You'll have full strategic and operational visibility across the organisation and help strike the balance between risk and opportunity. Conveo operates across Europe and the US, so you'll also support our New York team and work across jurisdictions.
You'll lead our legal associate directly and manage our external lawyers. Legal here is both sword and shield for our commercial team. You'll be commercially pragmatic: working with the business, you'll make proportionate risk calls on the deal as a whole, not clause by clause, and you'll be prepared to work at pace. You know that speed and clarity matter, and that sometimes legal rigour is what saves us down the road.
This role is based in our London office, in a hybrid setup (3 days a week in the office expected).
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Own our commercial contracts
- Review and negotiate our most important client and reseller agreements: MSAs, DPAs, SLAs and order forms, often against enterprise procurement and legal teams
- Own supplier contract reviews
- Set fallback positions so deals don't stall, and tell the business clearly when to say no
- Build templates and playbooks so sales can close standard deals without you
Build the legal function
- Set up intake, templates, playbooks and a central contract repository
- Decide what is handled in-house and what goes to external counsel, and keep spend in check
- Select, brief and manage outside firms across jurisdictions
- Lead and develop our legal associate, and grow the team as the company scales
Own corporate, people and IP matters
- Keep corporate housekeeping in order across our entities
- Work closely with the CFO and corporate counsel on any debt or equity fundraises.
- Partner with our People team on employment and equity matters across the UK, Belgium, the US, and any new market we enter
- Protect our IP and work with external counsel to protect our brand
- Get the company ready for Series B and due diligence
Own the legal side of data privacy and AI
- Have a say in how we build and use AI in our product, advising product and engineering to remain compliant with the changing landscape of AI regulation.
- Create and own the data protection and AI terms in our client and supplier contracts, including DPAs and subprocessor terms
- Develop and help manage our AI Governance across the company.
WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
After 3 months
- You fully own the legal function
- You've completed a deep-dive risk review of our contracts and processes, covering commercial, employment and terms and conditions, so we know what is in place and what is not
- You've put a process in place to step into commercial agreements when needed
- You have a handle on every open external counsel matter, and you're leading on our longer-standing legal issues
- You've set up a working framework with our People team
- You're shaping how legal acts as both sword and shield for our commercial team
- Depending on when you join, you've started preparing the company for Series B and due diligence
After 6 months
- We contract with clients in a fundamentally better way, through a new contracting process
- There's a clear legal intake process across HR, corporate, IP and commercial
- You have strong working relationships with sales, product, engineering, finance and People, and everyone knows legal is the place to go for any agreement
- Our legal associate works independently and is growing as a legal professional
- Our external counsel spend is planned and predictable, with outside advice focused where it adds the most value
WHAT YOU'LL BRING
You're high agency and low ego, self-directing and startup-native. You stay calm with a long backlog, and you're genuinely interested in AI tools. You'll also bring:
- 10+ years qualified in any UK or EU jurisdiction, with private practice followed by in-house experience
- Experience leading an in-house legal function, ideally as head of legal or GC at a SaaS company, with the creativity and drive to build things from scratch
- Deep commercial experience, including IP and liability: MSAs, DPAs, order forms, and negotiating with enterprise procurement and legal teams
- A track record of building legal process from scratch: templates, playbooks, intake, a contract repository
- Experience running external counsel across several jurisdictions and keeping spend in check
- Working knowledge of employment, equity and corporate matters across multi-entity groups, with exposure to the UK, US and Belgium.
- Comfort making risk calls and closing imperfect contracts, and giving clear, usable advice to non-lawyers and board-level readers
NICE TO HAVE
- Fundraising experience on the fund or company side
- US legal experience
- Experience with data privacy (GDPR) and AI regulation, such as the EU AI Act
- Experience with cross-border data transfers between the UK, EU and US
- Hands-on experience with contract lifecycle tools and AI-assisted contract review
WHY JOIN US?
- Build the legal function at a hyper-growth, YC-backed AI company
- A true partnership role, working directly with our CFO and CEO
- Meaningful equity. We want you to own a piece of what we're building.
- Offices in London, Antwerp, and New York. We work best together, so 3 days a week in the office is required.
- Regular socials: rooftop drinks, team dinners, run clubs, and more
- Twice-yearly off-sites to places worth travelling to: Austria, Las Vegas, and Portugal
- Private health coverage with Vitality (incl. dental, vision)
- Enhanced employer pension contribution (5% employer, 3% employee contribution)
- Refer someone great and earn up to £5,000
