Senior Legal Counsel, Upvest
Investment Products
Investment API
Open for applications
Investment API
201-500 employees
Open for applications
201-500 employees
Company mission
To make investing as easy as spending money and to enable businesses to build investment experiences their customers love.
Role
Who you are
- Qualification: at least 3–5 years post-qualification experience (PQE) in the financial services industry. At least one German legal qualification (Erste Juristische Prüfung)
- Capital Markets Depth: Hands-on understanding of lifecycles across a variety of investment products (stocks, investment funds, bonds, derivatives) at the level of a seasoned practitioner
- Industry Background: Experience in a regulated investment firm, fintech, infrastructure provider, or bank with a brokerage and custody product offering
- Regulatory Expertise: Strong command of EU and German financial law (MiFID, WpIG, WpHG). Exposure to UK (FCA) regulation or other European NCAs is a strong plus
- International Mindset: Familiarity with adapting core legal frameworks to new European markets and regulatory regimes
- Automation Advocate: Enthusiasm for streamlining the legal function through technology whether tooling, AI-assisted review, or smarter process workflows
- Pragmatic and Direct: You focus on enabling growth through clear-eyed risk judgement. You cut through complexity and give the business answers it can act on
- Languages: Professional fluency in English and German — essential for regulatory filings and high-stakes stakeholder management
What the job involves
- As (Senior) Legal Counsel – Investment Products, you are part of the legal infrastructure that powers Upvest's Investment API.
- You bring a granular understanding of the capital markets lifecycle and you use it to build something durable: a scalable, cross-border legal framework that keeps pace with a fast-moving product
- Your mission is to enable Upvest's internationalisation by closing the gap between rigid financial regulation and flexible, API-driven product design.
- Working within a high-performing legal team, you will help ensure that as Upvest expands across the EEA, UK, and Switzerland, our product remains legally robust, commercially competitive, and technically precise
- Product Architecture & Compliance by Design: Be the legal authority on the lifecycle of financial instruments. Partner directly with Product and Engineering to co-design features from fractional trading to new asset classes, translating MiFID II/III and WpIG into concrete technical requirements so compliance is built in from the first line of code, not bolted on after
- Scalable Internationalisation: Own the legal adaptation of Upvest's core German investment offering as we expand into the UK, Switzerland, and the wider EEA. Define jurisdiction-specific requirements while preserving a coherent, scalable product framework across markets
- Regulatory Navigation: Serve as the internal expert on EU and German financial regulation. Monitor and interpret regulatory developments across MiFID, WpIG, WpHG, and MaRisk, and translate their implications into actionable guidance for Product, Operations, and Compliance
- Institutional Contracting: Lead and support the negotiation of complex B2B agreements with institutional counterparties, including credit institutions and global fintechs, across Upvest's offering
- Legal Ops & Automation: Drive the modernisation of Upvest's legal function. Champion the adoption of contract lifecycle management tools, AI-assisted review workflows, and scalable processes that free up capacity for high-value legal work
- Cross-functional Partnership: Act as a trusted adviser to Product, Engineering, Operations, and Compliance. Deliver clear, actionable guidance that enables commercial decisions cutting through complexity without creating bottlenecks
Our take
Upvest is a fintech startup that empowers financial services companies to provide their customers with access to a full range of financial assets, including stocks, ETFs and crypto products. Upvest's investment API integrates seamlessly with its customers existing systems and is designed to scale easily, freeing companies from the need to develop their own brokerage and custody infrastructure from scratch.
As one of the few companies in Germany that is licensed for both the custody of traditional securities and crypto, Upvest is able to provide its services across Europe. Its solution has been readily adopted by some major players in the space including Ginmon, Vivid and ABN AMRO.
Upvest is backed by a number of Europe's largest tech VCs, alongside American investment monolith BlackRock. In 2023, it closed a VC investment round that one of the largest in the German fintech arena. It has gone on to secure further funding which supports ventures such as absorbing the complexity of new local tax wrappers, rolling out AI-supported investment engines, and speeding up the rate at which clients can bring pension products to market .
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
40% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
Mar 2026
$90m
LATE VC
Dec 2024
$105.1m
SERIES C
Total funding: $289.3m
Company benefits
- Greenfield projects - We’re building something quite complex. A first in Europe. This means you get to work with cutting-edge technologies, with no legacy code.
- Wellbeing - Everyone here has access to our in-house coach. You can have regular sessions to support you personally and professionally. We also believe it’s important to have time out to rest and recover, which is why we offer 30 days’ holiday.
- Development - In keeping with one of our values, ‘Learn and grow’, every Upvenger has access to a development budget. And in line with one of our other values, ‘Own the outcome’, how you make the most of it is up to you.
- Flexibility - We work in a hybrid set-up, with the team spread around Germany and other parts of Europe. We give you the choice and budget to work where you’re most comfortable and productive, either at home or in the office. You choose.
Company HQ
Kollwitzkiez, Berlin, Germany
Leadership
Martin Kassing
(Founder & CEO)They have experience in fintech, private equity and capital markets. Founded another fintech, Shop.co, which was acquired by Klarna.
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