Head of Legal, Risk & Compliance

About us:

BeZero Carbon is a global ratings agency for the Voluntary Carbon Market. We distribute our ratings via our SaaS Product, BeZero Carbon Markets, informing all market participants on how to price and manage risk. Our ratings and research tools support buyers, intermediaries, investors and carbon project developers.

Founded in April 2020, our 170+ strong team combines climatic and earth sciences, sell-side financial research, earth observation, machine learning, data and technology, engineering, and public policy expertise. We work from five continents.

We raised a significant Series B funding round in late 2022, and are growing rapidly as a company, accelerating the Net-Zero transition through ratings.

www.bezerocarbon.com

Job Description:

The Head of Legal, Risk and Compliance will be responsible for leading a key function at BeZero. They will work closely, as a true business partner, with senior leadership, commercial, product, HR and other business functions. Their responsibility covers all areas of legal impact, risk management and compliance policies, processes and reporting.

This is an exciting role for someone interested in working in a fast paced industry at the cutting edge of the climate response. You will not be a mere passenger or caretaker! From day 1, you will have the opportunity to be involved with designing and establishing new frameworks, structures, processes and reporting, as part of the relaunch of this function. You will then maintain, with continuous improvement, this function in the best ways to serve our business through an exciting period of growth ahead. Your day to day will be very hands on and require balancing risk with commercial needs, addressing a dynamic and varied set of questions across our rapidly growing company.

You will be strategic thinking and creative, helping the business build commercial solutions whilst mitigating and managing risks at suitable levels. You will be both internal and external client facing and able to build strong, effective, influential, relationships.As the business expands and grows, there may be opportunity to build, and therefore also manage, a team.

Our ideal candidate will have experience working in scaling organisations managing legal functions and working with both commercial agreements and data protection in technology; you will be comfortable advising on and handling a wide range of legal and compliance issues and ready to research areas and issues where there is knowledge gap, or use external counsel where needed, to ultimately advise the business in a competent way.

Responsibilities:

●Responsibility for all areas of legal impact at BeZero, from commercial contracts to employment agreements to data compliance, working closely with the Sales team, the People team, the operations team and the senior leadership team

●Responsibility for managing and maintaining compliance frameworks, processes and reporting and audit trails

●Responsibility for managing all commercial contract templates and review of non standard contractual terms, as well as terms with vendors and suppliers.

●Providing proactive legal opinions and advising on legal matters affecting the business

●Offering pragmatic solutions to addresslegal risks and protect the business, whilst enabling and empowering the business to pursue commercial activities

●Managing the end-to-end legal activities, leveraging retained legal counsel and other sources of research for expert advice where required

●Running effective and efficient legal processes to complete contract negotiations in a timely manner, including updating and adjusting commercial contracts

●Effectively researching any relevant areas of law which are new to industry, new to our business or simply new to you.

●Ensuring and maintaining relevant policies and procedures in place that address compliance with relevant laws and regulations for the jurisdictions we operate

●Supporting and managing the way in which we meet the regulations and compliance needs, including around GDPR, data privacy and data processing as we scale

●Monitoring legislative developments to identify impacts on the business

●Owning and managing legal paperwork for the business, from employment contracts and share agreements to commercial agreements and supplier contracts

●Identifying and implementing improvements to existing process; implementing new process where there are gaps

●Identifying and implementing improvements to contracts and other documents

●Managing relationships with external legal counsel

You will be our ideal candidate if:

●You have appropriate legal qualificationsand have strong experience managing in-house legal, risk and compliance activities

●You have strong knowledge and understanding of data privacy regulations and issues

●You have great communication and relationship management skills, and are able to simplify complex legal issues to suit the relevant non-legal audience

●You have a strong eye for detail but combined and balanced by a sense of pragmatism and commercial priorities

●You’re comfortable with the idea of lending your advice and experience across multiple aspects of law and legal compliance

●You are able to operate at pace and in ambiguous environments, as well as being able to operate across competing and changing priorities

●You’re comfortable and experienced at providing opinions on options and risks around a wide range of legal and compliance issues

Additional Preferences:

●In house experience in SME and/or B2B SaaS and/or high growth, rapid scaling environments

●Proven track record of designing and implementing new compliance processes and frameworks

●Experienced in managing matters with external counsel

●Experienced in hiring and managing (small) teams

●Experience of risk and insurance portfolio management

●Strong intellectual property knowledge/capability

Please know that even if you don’t have experience in all the areas above but think you could do a great job and are excited about building a great company culture, bringing transparency to the voluntary carbon market, and being part of a fast-growing team, we would love to hear from you!

What we’ll offer:

●Competitive salary and equity in a rapidly growing VC-backed start-up through share options

●25 days leave (with additional time off between Christmas and New Year, and for your birthday)

●Benefits package covering private medical insurance, dental, critical illness cover, income protection, life assurance, medical cash plan and cycle to work scheme

●Health and wellness cash allowance

●Enhanced parental leave

●Regular social events

●Flexibility to split your time between working from home and our East London office space (Liverpool Street)

●Nomad working over the summer, allowing you to work from another country

Our interview process:

●Initial screening interview

●Manager interview

●Technical interview

●Final stage interview

●Reference checks + offer

We value diversity at BeZero Carbon. We need a team that brings different perspectives and backgrounds together to build the tools needed to make the voluntary carbon market transparent. We are therefore committed to not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, veteran status, age, or disability.