Associate General Counsel

About Wintermute

At Wintermute our mission is to enable, empower and advance the truly decentralized world for more transparent and efficient markets and products. We do this by providing liquidity algorithmically across most trading venues in crypto, supporting all major centralized and decentralized trading venues, AMMs, RFQs, aggregators and chains.

Wintermute’s customer-facing business includes various OTC products such as electronic trading API and single-dealer platform for a wide range of counterparties from crypto native whales to large traditional finance institutions. Wintermute is also providing market making services for blockchain projects where we support most of the world’s largest and most prominent launches. In addition to providing the best in class liquidity products, Wintermute is actively participating in the building and development of the blockchain ecosystem through investments from Wintermute Ventures, partnerships and co-development with upcoming protocols and incubation of own projects.

Wintermute is a hyper-growth highly profitable business with a very ambitious vision and roadmap. We manage billions of dollars in assets and trade more than $5B/day. We are backed by Lightspeed, Pantera Capital, Sino Global Capital, Blockchain.com Ventures, Avon Ventures by Fidelity Investments, DeFi Alliance and other top tier investors. We are run as a technology company, not a financial service provider, and we build our culture around core values of ambition, collaboration, entrepreneurship, transparency and meritocracy.

Nature of the role

We are a hyper-growth startup in one of the most dynamic industries today. We are looking for an Associate General Counsel who has experience in traditional financial markets and can easily adapt to the entrepreneurial, varied and highly dynamic nature of Wintermute’s business, as well as to the challenges and opportunities specific to the cryptocurrency business. This role will work closely with the General Counsel and cover all jurisdictions where Wintermute is currently active (UK, Singapore, USA), as well as all products and relevant areas of law. In this role you will have a high level of responsibility and autonomy.

Key Responsibilities

• Regulatory compliance: work closely with the General Counsel to monitor the regulatory landscape across jurisdictions and assist with ensuring financial regulatory compliance under each license authority (FCA, MAS, SEC, CTFC, etc.)
• Commercial agreements: draft and negotiate agreements in relation to our services (OTC, market making), borrowing/lending partnerships, and other agreements between entities
• Corporate structuring: manage the corporate structure across multiple entities and jurisdictions.
• Corporate law: support fundraising & transactions, equity investments in third-party companies, M&A activity
• General compliance: work closely with the compliance team to protect the company against compliance risks, while staying commercially focused
• External presence: work with other blockchain companies to educate regulators and the wider industry on blockchain, crypto topics and best practices from financial markets

Other Responsibilities

• External counsel: Manage external counsel as required, e.g. employment law, counsel in relation to other jurisdictions, etc. Assist with managing legal spend and review legal bills

Hard Skills Requirements

• 5-10 years of experience practicing law (qualified) at a top-tier law firm or as in-house counsel for a firm specialized in financial services, fintech and/or crypto;
• Substantial experience working in a high-performance, dynamic and high-growth environment is strongly preferred
• In depth knowledge of FCA regulations in relation to proprietary trading, financial services and crypto; general knowledge of regulations in other jurisdictions, specifically Singapore and US a plus
• Experience/understanding of DeFi i.e. types of tokens, token governance, DAOs, blockchain foundations and decentralized organizations is a significant advantage
• Strong grasp of commercial law in relation to financial services, e.g. derivative contracts, ISDAs, financial services contracts (OTC, structured products, etc)
• Ability and interest to learn other areas of law quickly, at least at a general level
• Proven ability to see the bigger picture and commercial strategy; quickly understand new functional areas and have a cross-functional mindset
• Strong interest and curiosity in algorithmic trading and decentralized finance

Other Skills Requirements

• Owner mentality: you focus on the ultimate result (short- and long-term P&L for the company); understand the importance of strategically growing the business for the future and the overall business beyond your own functional expertise, while overseeing the protection of the company from regulatory and other legal risks
• Proven ability to be both a strategic thinker and excellent executer; willing to be hands-on and have a drive to do whatever it takes to get things done
• Understand the fine balance between commercial objectives and legal/compliance risk
• Share Wintermute culture values: determination/ambition and humility; drive to action, ability to both influence others and listen/ learn from others
• Like meritocracy and being ready to be judged by what you deliver (vs pedigree or former experience)
• Have an entrepreneurial mindset vs 9-to-5 mentality; prepared to work non-standard working hours as required
• Like working in the team environment from our London office

Wintermute Offer

• A unique opportunity to join one of the fastest growing fintech companies globally as the second member of the legal team and to take on personal ownership and accountability
• Very interesting projects in the most dynamic finance industry: a level of learning and responsibilities that is hard for any law firm or traditional trading company/bank/hedge fund to match
• Great company culture: informal, non-hierarchical, ambitious, highly professional yet dynamic, collaborative, entrepreneurial
• Aligned incentive structure: a significant part of your compensation is performance-based bonus and equity package