Founding Legal Counsel, Deeploy

• 4-8 years of legal experience, ideally gained in or alongside tech
• Experience in the tech sector, working with startups, scaleups or in another way working in a tech environment. Technically literate and comfortable working directly with product and engineering, to shape our product and it supports our customers
• A genuine interest in AI and its risk landscape (privacy, cyber, AI governance), beyond "just" using the AI tools
• Strong on novel regulation: able to read something ambiguous and form a clear, defensible position, also without every standard yet published
• Comfortable owning several workstreams at once as the first and only lawyer, with C-level actively involved and backing you
• Ready to step into a startup, trading structure and certainty for ownership and pace. You're enterpreneurial, take ownership and focus on results
• A solid legal background; the exact qualification matters less than the capability
• Working proficiency in English, Dutch is a plus

Desirable

• At Deeploy, we help organisations roll out AI they can trust. The rules for trustworthy AI are being written right now, and most of them are still ambiguous. As our first legal hire, you'll be the person who reads the regulation, decides what it means in practice, and builds that judgment into both our product and our company
• This is not a back-office contracts seat. At an AI governance company, legal judgment sits close to the product and to every enterprise deal. You'll report to the COO and work closely with the wider C-level, who stay actively involved and hold end responsibility in their areas. You drive the legal function day to day, you're not left to carry it alone
• Track and interpret the EU AI Act and the regimes around it (GDPR, DORA, sectoral rules, ISO standards, NIST frameworks), and turn obligations into concrete product and process implications
• Form clear, defensible positions where official guidance is thin, working with external partners where it helps
• Feed that interpretation into the roadmap, so our product reflects how the regulation actually lands
• Own enterprise contracting together with sales: master agreements, SaaS terms, SLAs, data processing agreements, partner and referral agreements, and NDAs
• Support deal velocity with large, regulated customers without dropping rigour
• Own our data, privacy and AI policy and the compliance behind it
• Identify, mitigate and document our own cyber, AI and privacy risks
• Lead the annual ISO 42001 and ISO 27001 audits and own the management-system documentation, partnering with security and engineering on the technical controls
• Help shape posts, talks and material aimed at legal and compliance audiences, strengthening our standing with that crowd
• Act as a credible domain voice for prospects' and customers' legal teams, explaining how the regulation works and how Deeploy fits, supporting their decision without becoming their counsel
• Work alongside C-level as in-house counsel on the bigger annual topics: funding, EU programmes and grants, investor and board matters, drawing on outside counsel where it's warranted
• This role sits at an unusual intersection: sharp enough to form a defensible view on regulation that barely has precedent, practical enough to get an enterprise contract over the line, together with the team, in a startup environment
• It is a builder role. You create the legal function, you don't maintain one that already exists. Legal currently sits with founders and some external support from law firms
• It is broad and hands-on, with regulatory interpretation first and commercial contracts a close second
• It is not a pure contracts seat, and not a compliance-checklist role
• It is not outside counsel for our customers. You support our product and go-to-market as a domain expert
• You report to the COO and sit close to every part of the business, with C-level holding end responsibility in their domains (commercial with the CEO, product with the CTO, certification with the CTO and COO, risk with the CEO and COO)

• Application: Share your LinkedIn/CV and anything you've worked on that you're proud of
• Introductory call: A 20-minute chat to introduce our team and learn more about you
• Personal and team fit: A 60-minute conversation with two people you'd work with closely
• Case study: A timeboxed case (3 hours) presented in a follow-up meeting with two team members
• Offer: If we're a fit, we'll extend an offer and welcome you aboard