Global General Counsel (Fintech/DeFi)

About Acala

Acala’s mission is to build and nurture the autonomous financial infrastructure of the decentralized web. Delivering on this mission will bring more financial accessibility, opportunity, and prosperity to everyone on the planet through a new, open financial system.

Our core project is the Acala Network itself, which we expect to become the de facto DeFi parachain and stablecoin of the Polkadot ecosystem. Polkadot provides the underlying trust primitives to our parachain, upon which we’ve built our suite of financial primitives including; Multi-collateralized Stablecoin; Trustless Staking Derivatives, and Unified Decentralized Exchange. These primitives will be used by us and other teams to power open DeFi innovations, and burn away all need for the parasitic intermediaries that inhabit almost every conventional trust-based financial system.

We have secured our support from eminent backers like Polychain, Coinbase Venture, Pantera and many more. We’re still preparing Acala’s parachain launch, so there’s no better time to join our mission and be a part of the future that we’re building. Because whoever you are, we’re building it for you 🚀

About the Role:

TLDR: A full-time fully remote role for an internal GC familiar with fintech legal practices and anti-crypto regulations, and who reads small print.

This is the first General Counsel role at Acala. Ahead of our upcoming Polkadot launch, and the subsequent wave of integrations with other blockchain teams and payment service providers that will follow it, Acala has outlined its internal legal strategy for 2022. Although we intend to continue (and grow) our working relationships with our outsourced legal services partners in many regions of the world, we need an experienced pair of hands into which we can place the reins of this legal strategy. We also anticipate an increase in the number of patent and regulation issues that we’ll encounter, and we’re determined to take action to prepare for them.

In this role you will have three primary responsibilities; Legal Adviser to the C-Level founding team; Principal Liaison to our external legal partners; Researcher into the nitty-gritty detail of fintech patent law and ‘best practice’ methods for integration efforts (think ‘when Uber met Visa’ and you’re on the right track). To be successful in each of these three respects you’ll need a background not only on the frontlines of technology legal practice, but also that of the finance / payments industry. Experience working as an internal legal counsel for a technology startup will be highly advantageous, but is not an absolute requisite.

If you’ve negotiated similar legal cases before, and are as invested in a blockchain-based future are we are, then we want to hear from you.

What you’ll do

• Oversee and help to shape our international legal strategy, via any means necessary
• Proactively identify and overcome the obstacles we face in 2022 and beyond
• Navigate the emergent legal trends in the blockchain industry to sharpen your legal advice to us
• Draft, review and maintain contractual documents and legal disclaimers
• Manage day-to-day legal operations within the company (contractual agreements, etc.)

What it takes

• License to practice law in US / APAC jurisdiction(s)
• 3+ years of legal experience in international law firms
• 1 year minimum in-house legal counsel experience
• Experience with mature stage startups
• Strong knowledge of fintech practices, and digital assets or tokens
• All the other sexy stuff around drafting & redrafting regulatory contracts

What we offer

• Competitive contract-based compensation (you’ll have to invoice us from wherever you are)
• Flexible working hours within Pacific timezones
• Collaborative, transparent and empowering work culture
• Meaningful work on creating better technologies for a fairer future
• Opportunity to work in a multinational, high-performance team with diverse backgrounds

Our Team

Working across New Zealand, the USA & China, our team has emerged from our shared desire for a fairer and more inclusive financial system - in direct contrast to the clear shortcomings of the current institutions that run the world. We’re just people like you, but we’re some of the leading blockchain innovators, Substrate and Rust developers, full-stack dApp developers and economists.

Our Values

The community we’re building is shaped by our values and fuelled by the needs of all humans:

• Inclusion, Care, Trust, and Respect
• Empowerment
• Guidance and Support
• Friendship, Community, Real Relationships

We’re building Acala based on a core set of values we believe are in line with the tenets of web3:

• True decentralization
• Less Trust, More Truth
• Integrity
• Accountability
• Empowering individuals with more autonomy

What We Have Achieved

Acala was founded in 2019 as an early Web3 Foundation grant recipient, and is an ecosystem and education partner of W3F and Polkadot. We have delivered 3 successful live testnet candidates acquiring 14,000 new accounts and 140,000 transactions within the first 3 weeks. And we expect to be among the first to launch on both Kusama and Polkadot in 2021. Stay tuned!

For more information on this position, our employment conditions, or anything Acala related not linked above, get in touch with our Auckland-based Talent Manager: [email protected].