Legal Counsel - M&A and Corporate (m/f/d)

Kayzen

LEGAL COUNSEL (M/F/D) Remote Europe Hello 👋  I’m Robert, Finance & Legal Lead at Kayzen and I’m now looking for a Legal Counsel to join our team. As we scale our business globally — managing an increasingly complex client and vendor landscape, navigating cross-border data privacy requirements, and growing our equity and corporate structure — we need a sharp, pragmatic, and commercially minded legal mind to own our legal function. You will take what we have built so far and professionalise, scale, and strengthen it. Working closely with our Finance & Legal Lead, you will be a true business partner to senior leadership across the company. About Kayzen Kayzen is an App demand-side platform (DSP) dedicated to democratizing app advertising on Mobile and Connected TV devices. We enable leading apps, agencies, media buyers, and brands to run programmatic customer acquisition, retargeting, and brand performance campaigns through our self-serve and managed service options. Built on the three core pillars of performance, transparency, and control, Kayzen powers the world’s best performance marketing teams with bespoke solutions that fuel business growth and deliver a competitive advantage. With an unprecedented scale of 300B+ daily ad requests from 1.6B+ unique users worldwide, we serve up to 1B+ ads per day in 180 countries. Kayzen is accessible through our APIs and user interface.  The team You will join a small, senior team and work directly alongside our Finance & Legal Lead. Your key stakeholders will be the leadership team, as well as our Finance, Operations, and Commercial functions across a globally distributed organisation. THE ROLE As Legal Counsel, you will be Kayzen’s primary legal owner across four core areas. You will operate as a trusted business partner — not just a gatekeeper — and are expected to move fast, apply sound commercial judgment, and help the business scale without unnecessary legal friction. Responsibilities GDPR & data privacy compliance * Own and continuously develop Kayzen’s GDPR compliance programme as an AdTech company operating across multiple jurisdictions, with a particular focus on EU and US privacy frameworks * Advise on data processing agreements, privacy notices, consent frameworks, and cross-border data transfers * Act as primary point of contact for internal privacy questions Transaction advice & contract negotiations * Provide legal counsel on T&Cs and related transactions * Lead or support contract negotiations with clients and vendors, including MSAs, SaaS agreements, partnership agreements, and NDAs * Ensure commercial contracts are legally robust and aligned with company risk appetite Cap table & corporate law * Manage and maintain Kayzen’s cap table * Oversee corporate governance across Kayzen’s group structure, including subsidiary management, shareholder resolutions, and notarial filings under German law * Support fundraising and investor relations from a legal and corporate perspective General compliance * Further develop and scale Kayzen’s compliance framework to match our growth as an internationally operating company * Monitor relevant regulatory developments (ad-tech, data privacy, employment, corporate) and translate them into actionable guidance for the business REQUIREMENTS * Qualified lawyer (“Volljurist”) or Business lawyer (“Wirtschaftsjurist”) with 2–5 years of relevant professional experience * Strong understanding of German business law is essential; additionally solid understanding of international and US legal frameworks, particularly in the context of data privacy and commercial contracts * Strong knowledge of GDPR and European data protection law; familiarity with US privacy regulations (CCPA etc.) a strong plus * Experience in a start-up or scale-up environment is strongly preferred — you know how to work lean, move fast, and prioritise pragmatically * Hands-on experience with contract drafting and commercial negotiations across a variety of agreement types * Familiarity with cap table management and corporate governance in a VC-backed or founder-led company context * Commercially minded: you understand that good legal advice enables business, not just protects it * Fluent in English & German  * Demonstrated ability to leverage AI tools to enhance legal productivity — you move fast and work smart WHAT WE OFFER * A high-impact legal role with real ownership and room to grow the function * Direct collaboration with the Finance & Legal Lead and senior leadership * Competitive fixed compensation commensurate with experience * Fully remote work arrangement * €500 home-office setup budget * €1,000 annual learning & development budget * A motivated, diverse, and internationally distributed team

FREENOW

Location: Hamburg or Berlin! At Freenow by Lyft, we’re not just moving people - we’re empowering smarter mobility decisions to help people move freely and make cities thrive.  We are pioneers in the tech-driven mobility space, building the future of urban transportation. As we scale our operations and pioneer autonomous vehicle technologies across the EU, we face a sophisticated landscape of regulatory challenges that require a world-class compliance framework. We’re seeking a Senior Legal Counsel (Corporate & M&A) to lead our legal strategy across two primary pillars: comprehensive corporate governance and M&A transactions throughout Europe. In this role, you will act as the primary legal architect for M&A activities while simultaneously overseeing the corporate lifecycle and governance of our international subsidiaries. You will manage complex negotiations, draft transactional and corporate documentation, and ensure that our corporate structure and M&A initiatives are executed with precision to protect the company’s global interests. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- YOUR DAILY ADVENTURES WILL INCLUDE: * Oversee entity lifecycle management, corporate secretarial matters, and board support across European subsidiaries. * Draft and manage intercompany agreements and support internal group reorganizations. * Provide ongoing legal counsel to internal business units on corporate law matters. * Lead the full M&A lifecycle, including strategic deal preparation, drafting LOIs, performing legal due diligence, and negotiating transactional documentation (SPAs, TSAs) with rigorous risk protection. Guide on regulatory approvals and bring the deal to completion. * Architect legal integration plans for acquired businesses and ensure harmonized post-close entity governance and regulatory compliance. * Direct outside counsel globally, managing engagement, budgets, and deliverables across multi-jurisdictional matters to ensure high-quality output and cost efficiency. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THIS ROLE: * A qualified lawyer with 5+ years of PQE specializing in both Corporate law and M&A, ideally gained through a combination of top-tier law firm and in-house experience within a fast-paced, tech-driven environment. * Fluent in English, with professional proficiency in German as a significant advantage. * A strong project manager capable of coordinating complex, multi-jurisdictional deal workstreams and balancing competing priorities under tight deadlines. * A master communicator with the ability to influence senior stakeholders and translate legal complexity into crystal clear, actionable business guidance. * Highly diligent, proactive, and collaborative, with a proven track record of building effective relationships across cross-functional teams. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BENEFITS & PERKS IN A NUTSHELL: * Flexible working arrangements * LinkedIn Learning * Sabbatical & special leave policies * WeRoad partnership * Birthday, 24th + 31st December off * Short term EU work policy * Mobility Credit   * Employee assistance program     Plus more local benefits depending on your work location!   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION: Freenow is an equal opportunity employer and we consider qualified applicants regardless of race, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability or age. We want you to grow and evolve, bring your true self to work.  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT FREENOW: Freenow by Lyft empowers smarter mobility decisions, helping people to move freely and cities to thrive. Through our multi-mobility app, we feature broad options for everyone across 9 European markets and over 180 cities. Millions of passengers can access services including taxis, private hire vehicles, carsharing, car rental, e-scooters, e-bikes, e-mopeds, and public transport within a single app.  In July 2025 Freenow was acquired by Lyft, a global mobility platform, which connects riders and drivers for billions of rides across North America and Europe. Together, Freenow and Lyft are creating a more caring and connected world, with transportation for everyone. We are a global, diverse, highly motivated, and collaborative team that strives for excellence and likes to have fun. Ready for your next ride?

Prior Labs

WHO WE ARE Foundation models transformed text and images. Structured data - the largest and most consequential data format in the world - stayed untouched. Tables run every clinical trial, every financial model, every scientific experiment, every business decision, and no one had built a foundation model that truly understood them. Until now. What LLMs did for language, we're doing for tables. The next modality shift in AI is happening, and we're hiring the team that makes it. Momentum. We pioneered tabular foundation models and are now the world-leading organization in structured-data ML. Our TabPFN v2 model was published as a Nature cover story and set a new state of the art for tabular machine learning. Since release we've scaled model capabilities 20x+, passed 3.5M+ downloads and 7,500+ GitHub stars, and are seeing accelerating adoption across research and industry - from detecting lung disease with Oxford Cancer Analytics to preventing train failures with Hitachi to improving clinical-trial decisions with BostonGene. The hardest work is ahead. We're scaling tabular foundation models to millions of rows, thousands of features, real-time inference, and entirely new data modalities, while building the infrastructure to run them in production across some of the most demanding industries on earth. These are open problems no one else is working on at this level. Our team. We're a small, highly selective team of 30+ engineers, researchers, and GTM specialists, with backgrounds spanning Google, Apple, Amazon, DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft Research, G-Research, Jane Street, Goldman Sachs, and CERN. We're led by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir, and advised by world-leading AI researchers including Bernhard Schölkopf and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun. We ship fast, do top-tier research, and hold each other to an extremely high bar. What's next. In 2025 we raised €9m pre-seed led by Balderton Capital, backed by leaders from Hugging Face, DeepMind, and Black Forest Labs. The next phase of growth is here, which makes this an ideal time to join. YOUR MISSION Reporting to the COO, you'll own legal across the company: commercial contracts, IP, data privacy, post-acquisition governance, and everything in between. This is a hands-on senior IC role. You'll be the person who does the work, builds the systems, and becomes the one place the team turns to on any legal question. You'll handle what you can and manage specialist external counsel for everything else. YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES * Be the team's single point of contact for all legal requests. Triage what can be handled in-house, manage external counsel for everything else, and build the systems that keep legal from becoming a bottleneck. * Own the legal workstream arising from the SAP acquisition: corporate structure, IP ownership, governance documentation, and the ongoing legal relationship with the parent company. * Take ownership of commercial contracting end-to-end: negotiate and redline MSAs, NDAs, DPAs, and vendor agreements, and build a standard template library so routine deals don't require counsel at all. * Build the legal function from the ground up: a contract management system, policy library, and internal escalation playbook that gives the team clear guardrails and scales beyond you. * Define and protect Prior Labs' IP and open-source legal posture, including the boundary between TabPFN's open-source release and commercial product: licensing strategy, patents, trademarks, and contributor agreements. * Bringing in and manage specialist external counsel where the depth or jurisdiction requires it. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR Must have * 3+ years as in-house counsel at a tech or AI company * Has personally owned a major corporate transaction or M&A process from the legal side * Has negotiated commercial agreements (MSAs, DPAs, NDAs) directly with counterparties, without outside counsel carrying the work * Track record managing external counsel: selecting firms, scoping mandates, controlling spend * Has built or significantly shaped a legal function at an early-stage company (first or second in-house hire) * Comfortable operating across both EU/German and US legal frameworks Nice to have * Open-source licensing or software IP experience * Experience with cap table management Life at Prior Labs We're a small, ambitious team solving one of the hardest problems in AI, and we're just getting started. You'll work closely with world-class researchers and builders who care deeply about the quality of their craft, the impact of their work, and the people they work with. We move fast, we think rigorously, and we take the time to do things right. If you're excited by hard problems, motivated by real-world impact, and want to be part of building something that matters, we'd love to hear from you. We're building our teams in Berlin, Freiburg, and New York and we believe that when you're working on something as hard and exciting as TabPFN, being in the same room matters. Most of our roles are based in one of our offices but great people come from everywhere, and in exceptional cases we're open to remote. This usually involves frequent travel to one of our offices and the whole company comes together regularly for offsites to think, build, and celebrate together. Our Commitments We believe the best products and teams come from a wide range of perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. That's why we welcome applications from people of all identities and walks of life, especially anyone who's ever felt discouraged by "not checking every box." We're committed to creating a safe, inclusive environment and providing equal opportunities regardless of gender, sexual orientation, origin, disability, or any other trait that makes you who you are. We care about how your data is handled. Read our Recruiting Privacy Notice to see exactly what we collect, why, and how long we keep it.