The posting
Job description
About Reward
Founded in 2001, Reward is an industry leader transforming the world of customer engagement and commerce media. Operating in 15 countries across Europe and Middle East, Reward’s cloud-based API platform integrates content, advertising, and commerce to deliver exceptional experiences for consumers resulting in increased customer engagement, retention, and overall satisfaction.
Reward’s Loyalty-tech platform is behind many award-winning bank loyalty programmes seen today from brands such as Visa, NatWest Group, Barclays, and First Abu Dhabi Bank to name a few. Reward also works with the world’s largest retailers such as McDonald’s, eBay, Deliveroo and Amazon.
Their leading commerce media platform fuses purchase insights with loyalty-tech, offering an unparalleled edge in digital advertising and performance marketing for retailers. Leveraging rich data and insights, the Reward platform provides a comprehensive view of consumer behaviour, empowering retailers to target marketing messages more effectively, resulting in independently verified sales uplift and long-term customer lifetime value.
Beyond bridging the gap between content and commerce, Reward is a purpose driven business. Their mission is to make everyday spending more rewarding. During the last 5 years, Reward has proudly given back more than £2 billion in cashback rewards to consumers world-wide.
Most recently, Reward’s rapid growth was recognised in The Independent’s E2ETech100 list of fastest growing tech scale-ups in the UK. Reward, in conjunction with partners NatWest Group, was also awarded the Industry Achievement Award 2023 at the prestigious Card and Payments Awards.
The Role
The Head of Legal and Compliance is the senior legal role in Reward, leading the legal, risk and compliance function, reporting to the Chief Financial Officer and working directly with the Reward executive team. The General Counsel function for the group sits with Rezolve AI Plc, and this role holds legal and compliance for Reward. Following the acquisition of Reward by Rezolve AI Plc in February 2026, the group spans loyalty, commerce media, payments data analytics and AI-driven commerce technology across the UK, EMEA and the Middle East.
The role carries a team of three: a senior legal counsel covering the commercial, technology and regional contracting portfolio, a head of compliance covering the compliance framework, risk oversight, the certification portfolio and corporate sustainability, and a senior paralegal supporting across both.
The role requires a risk-based mindset: the ability to identify the critical areas of concern and to construct solutions that are legally compliant and commercially viable, and the articulacy to present them clearly to a non-legal audience. This is a leadership role that remains hands-on. The Head of Legal and Compliance sets the legal and compliance strategy for Reward, owns the positions the business contracts on, carries the most significant negotiations personally, and is the executive team’s first call on anything that carries legal, regulatory or reputational consequence.
Reward seeks a commercially minded leader who is comfortable holding a line with the legal, procurement and security teams of the largest banks and retailers in the world, and who wants the breadth of a function that spans commercial contracting, data protection, artificial intelligence, regulation, compliance and certification. Qualification and Experience: • Qualified solicitor or barrister in England and Wales, or qualified in another common law jurisdiction. • A minimum of ten years’ post-qualification experience, with a substantial period spent in-house. • Experience of leading a legal or legal and compliance function, including direct management of qualified professionals. • An international orientation, with familiarity with the UK and EU legal regimes and comfort working across multiple jurisdictions.
Commercial and Technology Contracting (essential): • Substantial technology and commercial contracting experience: platform, SaaS and licensing terms, master services agreements, data licensing and data sharing, API and integration agreements, and inbound cloud, hosting and professional services contracts. • Command of the service level, security, liability and indemnity architecture behind those agreements, and a clear grasp of the commercial consequences of each. • A track record of leading significant negotiations personally and to conclusion, including with the legal and procurement functions of major financial institutions.
Data Protection, AI and Regulation (essential): • Substantive data protection expertise under the UK and EU GDPR, applied to high-volume personal data processing. • Working knowledge of AI governance and of the EU AI Act, and the judgment to set a workable internal position ahead of settled practice. • Familiarity with the regulatory requirements imposed on suppliers to regulated financial institutions. • Knowledge of FCA regulation, PCI DSS, the UK and EU GDPR and data usage rights as they apply to a supplier operating in the banking and loyalty sector.
Compliance and Risk: • Experience of owning or overseeing a compliance framework and a risk register in a regulated or client-audited environment. • Familiarity with information security certification, in particular PCI DSS and ISO 27001, and with the client assurance exercises that depend on them. • Experience of banking partnerships, loyalty programmes and redemptions is a distinct advantage.
Leadership and Stakeholder: • Credibility and presence with an executive team, with the confidence to challenge as well as to advise. • A record of developing people, with the appetite to lead a small team closely rather than through layers. • The capacity to explain legal and regulatory concepts in plain English to a non-legal audience. • Sound commercial judgment, a practical and problem-solving orientation, and scrupulous adherence to legal and ethical requirements.
Desirable: • In-house experience in a payments, loyalty, banking technology or data analytics business, or as a supplier to regulated financial institutions. • Experience within a group structure with a listed parent, including working with a group legal or group risk function. • Experience of the DIFC, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other CEMEA markets. • A recognised data protection qualification, for example the CIPP/E. • Practical experience of using AI tools to streamline legal and commercial workflows. Leadership and Executive Advice • Set and lead the legal, risk and compliance strategy for Reward, aligned to the commercial plan and to the requirements of the group. • Develop and implement the function’s goals, objectives, budget and systems, and report on performance against them. • Act as the executive team’s principal legal adviser, providing clear, practical and timely advice on commercial, regulatory, data and reputational matters, and giving a recommendation rather than a list of options. • Attend and contribute to executive and governance forums, presenting the legal, risk and compliance position and the decisions required. • Support the expansion of Reward into new international markets, including market entry guidelines, the legal groundwork for new propositions and the assessment of local requirements. • Work with the Rezolve General Counsel, group legal and group risk on the matters held at group level, including governance, the Data Protection Officer function and group risk reporting, and ensure that Reward’s position is represented and its obligations discharged. • Anticipate and mitigate legal exposure, develop strategies that avoid costly disputes, and manage any litigation, claims or regulatory investigations that arise, instructing external counsel where required.
Commercial and Technology Contracting • Own the group’s contracting positions for Reward: the templates, fallback positions and playbooks, and the determination of which positions are non-negotiable, which are tradeable and at what price. • Develop the key clause library, negotiation guidelines and supporting documentation that enable the commercial teams to reach outcomes at pace. • Lead personally on the most significant and complex agreements, including bank and issuer agreements, card scheme and network arrangements, retailer, merchant and publisher agreements, platform and data licensing, and the inbound technology supply chain. • Support Product and Engineering from the design stage, so that propositions are offered on terms that are commercially competitive, technically deliverable and protective of Reward’s intellectual property and data rights. • Oversee the intellectual property position across the business, including the brand and trade mark portfolio, licence scope, open source compliance, and the allocation of rights in models, derived data, insights and outputs.
Data Protection, AI and Regulation • Own data protection for Reward as a legal matter, under the UK and EU GDPR, PECR and equivalent marketing rules, and the regimes applicable to operations in the DIFC, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other CEMEA markets, setting the position on lawful basis, transparency, controller and processor allocation and international transfers. • Work with the Chief Data Officer and the head of compliance on data usage, protection and privacy guidelines, including the consumer-facing policies, notices and terms and conditions. • Own the AI legal and governance framework, including the EU AI Act and comparable emerging regimes, training and input data rights, model and vendor terms, automated decision-making, and the internal AI use policies. • Own the legal assessment of the regulatory perimeter as it affects Reward’s propositions, including financial promotions, consumer protection and unfair commercial practices, marketing and consent, and the requirements imposed on Reward as a supplier to regulated financial institutions.
Compliance, Risk and Assurance • Own the compliance framework for Reward and the standards to which the business operates, holding the head of compliance accountable for its delivery. • Oversee internal investigations and compliance audits, and ensure that findings are remediated and recorded. • Own risk oversight for Reward, including the risk register and the reporting that feeds into the Rezolve AI Plc group risk function. • Hold accountability for the certification portfolio, including PCI DSS and ISO 27001, and for the corporate sustainability programme, including the EcoVadis assessment. • Own the assurance position presented to clients, including the security and compliance content of RFPs, tenders and onboarding questionnaires, and the due diligence and audit exercises run by banks, merchants and partners.
Team and Function • Lead, develop and manage a team of three, setting objectives, managing performance and building the capability the business will need as it grows. • Allocate work across the team, hold the escalation point, and determine what is retained in-house and what is instructed externally. • Select and manage external counsel and advisers, and control legal and compliance spend against budget. • Continue to build the function: contract management and administration, self-service templates, approval workflows and matter intake, including the use of AI tooling where it demonstrably improves turnaround and quality. • Deliver training and practical guidance to the commercial, product, finance and operational teams, so that the business is equipped to make sound decisions without legal becoming a bottleneck.
Job benefits
The Benefits • Annual Leave: 25 days + bank holidays • Ability to buy and sell holiday days as well as the ability to bank days (tenure dependant) • Flexible working options: we are operating a hybrid working model with 3 days a week from the office • Pension: Hargreaves Lansdown up to 6% matched contribution • Generous family friendly cover • Private healthcare - Bupa • Income protection • Critical illness cover • Life insurance cover • Dental cover • Optical cover • Yulife app for access to employee wellbeing and discounts • Perks at Work, cashback/discount shopping site • Employee referral scheme • Salary sacrifice program which includes cycle to work scheme, electric car scheme and season ticket loans • Volunteering program • Company events i.e. Christmas party, all-company event and other social/hosted events during the year (we have an active social committee!) • Team socials
The stuff that matters to us Our values (and the behaviours they inspire) really matter to us. They inform how we approach the world and what it means for each and every Rewardee. We’ll give you more information on what they mean and how they come to life in our business, but for now, here’s the top line:
Equal Opportunities At Reward, we are committed to creating an inclusive and diverse workplace where everyone is valued, respected and given the opportunity to thrive. We are an equal opportunities employer and welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. Recruitment and employment decisions are based on skills, experience, capability and potential, and we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected characteristic. We are committed to ensuring our recruitment process is fair, accessible and inclusive. We will consider reasonable adjustments for candidates who require additional support during the recruitment and selection process. We believe that diversity of thought, background and experience strengthens our teams and helps us build a better Reward.
