Context

Dfns is a cybersecurity company that builds custody SaaS protocol for web3 apps. Think of it as a developer tool that provides secure cloud for crypto. Our mission is to bring serenity to DeFi by eliminating new blockchain risks and making crypto transactions easier, faster, more affordable, and compliant with existing regulations.

From fintechs to large banks to e-commerce sites, Dfns gives financial institutions and businesses the freedom to own and transfer crypto on a battle-designed security infrastructure. Our API is designed to offer best-in-class developer experience allowing any platform to deploy custodial wallets in a matter of days, with streamlined feature delivery and frequent security upgrades.

Founded in 2020 in Paris, Dfns is a startup incubated at Station F (awarded Future 40), accelerated by Techstars and recognized DeepTech by the French Ministry of Economy. Our company is fully remote with offices in Paris, Amsterdam, New York, London, Stockholm, Sofia, and other cities.

Job Description

You will contribute to one of the most ambitious technology projects in crypto today: building a trustless custody infrastructure for the trillion-dollar digital asset industry.

You will join an amazing team of leaders (CEO, COO, CTO) and experts (Head of People, Legal Counsel, Customer Care Manager) in a highly challenging and collaborative environment.

We are looking for an excellent General Counsel to add value to and be the backbone of our company. You will assist us in accomplishing our mission of improving digital asset security and empowering our clients with a decentralized custody solution. You will ensure that company operates within the law at all times, offer counsel on legal issues, create an effective guardian of the organisation and facilitate business strategies development. The successful candidate will be able to ensure legal compliance and limit risk exposure in a slippery and fast changing industry.

As General Counsel, you will oversee the legal aspects of our business. You will maintain our trustworthy reputation by guaranteeing that the company strictly follows law guidelines and give legal advice to management about issues such as crypto contracting, risk mitigation, digital asset regulations, privacy and data management, product development, and customer management. Ultimately, we expect you to enable a cybersecurity scale-up to thrive in DeFi by avoiding contentious mistakes through the design of comprehensive and extremely solid legal processes.

Mission

Your primary goal will be to build a powerful legal documentation and maintain legal compliance and responsiveness to prevent the company from being out of whack at all times.

Example of a primary metric would be Litigation Rate.

Your day-to-day projects will involve:

• Overseeing the legal matters of the business as a whole, including acting as the company’s legal representative.
• Sharing the big picture to your team, defining the levels of priority within the strategic roadmap, and being accountable for the deadlines and quality of deliverables.
• Acting as a powerhouse of ideas on all legal and compliance issues.
• Facilitating cross-team communication and know-how exchange between team members on all things law, compliance and policy designing.
• Providing expert and strategic legal advice to management, evaluating and weighing multiple inputs and impacts of any decision or course of action
• Managing, structuring, drafting, reviewing, negotiating, and closing various contracts and commercial transactions.
• Anticipating issues and estimating strategic risks, while identifying proactive solutions that will eliminate or mitigate those risks.
• Doing research and keeping executive members abreast of new laws, existing laws and legal rights that could impact functionality of the business.
• Hiring, onboarding, and training the legal and compliance teams.
• Maintaining knowledge of the company’s legal documents and operations, keeping a record of all legal documents and proceedings for the company.
• Facilitating filings of licensing forms and other statutory requirements.
• Communicating, negotiating and lobbying with external parties (regulators, external counsel, public authority etc.) while creating relations of trust.
• Legally filing for patents and copyright of intellectual property.
• Ensuring company policies and processes are law-abiding, and overseeing implementation.
• Working closely with CFO and finance team to review our tax strategies and comp plans.
• In close collaboration with CISO, ensuring end-to-end implementation and adoption of the applicable people-related security measures, and define the success metrics to follow.
• Working closely with Head of People and the compliance team to review and update our employment contracts and agreements, and to align them with applicable local laws.
• Assisting Head of People for employee grievances and policy violations invoking disciplinary action when required, by anticipating and resolving litigation risks.
• Crafting and reviewing legal strategy in response to any litigation.
• Researching DAO regulation and policies, and initiating research programs to assist throughout the progressive decentralization of the company and its products.
• Issue-spotting in regulatory areas such as ISO27001, gas fee-splitting, MPC-driven key sharding statute, and other technology-related specificities in the context of an SLA.
• Giving accurate and timely counsel to executives in a variety of legal topics (labor law, partnerships, international ventures, corporate finance, crypto asset regulation, DAO governance, stablecoin monetary policies, commercial law, etc.).
• Ensuring our record keeping and data processing procedures comply with GDPR.
• Keeping abreast of the latest trends and practices in law, namely in crypto and DeFi to feed the company’s strategic orientations.

Requirements

• 10+ years experience as General Counsel or similar roles.
• 3+ years expertise in crypto regulatory, DeFi, blockchain, general corporate, transactional, intellectual property, and compliance issues, including deep knowledge of SOC 2, ISO27001, financial regulations, and property law.
• Comprehensive commercial contract drafting and negotiation skills.
• Substantive experience across software and technology licensing, and data use.
• Flexibility and willingness to work on a broad variety of legal matters (corporate law, litigations, labor law, crypto, IP, etc.).
• Great knowledge of employment legislation and regulations (particularly employment contracts, employee leaves and insurance plans).
• Proven experience of successfully structuring and scaling legal systems at a rapid pace. Full understanding of the way organizations like scale-ups operate to meet their objectives.
• Be comfortable in an extremely fast-paced environment under tight timelines and successfully multitask and manage several projects simultaneously.
• Ability to stay nimble while staying compliant in a heavily regulated industry.
• In-depth understanding of how legal issues and external environment affect organisations.
• Demonstrated ability to create legal defensive or proactive strategies.
• Ability to develop legal strategies, objectives and quantifiable results.
• Well-versed in how business operate with financial acumen.
• High degree of professional ethics, integrity and gravitas.
• Excellent judgement and analytical skills.
• First class interpersonal and communication skills.
• Ability to anticipate legal issues or risks and to “see around the corner”.
• Founding-spirited with grit and guts to pursue complex worldwide ambitions.
• Problem-solving competences in respect to other stakeholders.
• Humble, respectful, and very professional to others.
• Able to decide even in stressful, unstable situations.
• Appetite for Cybersecurity, Blockchain, Decentralized Finance, and Technology.
• [Bonus] Proven track record working on developer tools, cybersecurity software, and/or API products.
• [Bonus] Proven work experience in blockchain, DeFi and/or cybersecurity industries.
• [Bonus] Extensive knowledge about the crypto custody industry and its use cases.
• [Bonus] Juris Doctorate, and/or Member of a bar.
• [Bonus] As much foreign languages as possible.

Benefits

• Title: General Counsel
• Salary: €180-300K / year (avg base range).
• Equity: 0.4-0.6% (≈ €12-18M in case of €2B exit).
• Bonus: peer and spot bonuses after 8 months with us.
• Location: Hybrid. You can either work in our offices, from home, or remote.
• Paid time off: No less than 30 days per year, plus national holidays.
• Employee benefits: healthcare, life insurance, retirement plan, sponsored transportation, gym cards, food, Apple devices and home office equipment, tuition fee assistance, team retreats, and more.