General Counsel

UpGuard•Austin, CA

2d•Remote

About The Position

UpGuard’s mission is to make life easier for security teams. We meticulously create robust solutions that enable our customers to identify, assess, and remediate cybersecurity risk across their attack surface, vendor ecosystem, workforce, and trust relationships. Our integrated cyber risk posture management platform combines comprehensive security ratings, instant risk assessments, templated security questionnaires, threat intelligence capabilities, and agentic AI to give organizations a holistic view of their risk surface. Our Legal team’s mission is to preempt, identify, and resolve legal risks in a timely manner to accelerate business goals. Legal is responsible for keeping UpGuard's operations compliant with all current laws and regulations. The Legal team exists to ensure that accountable decisions are taken at the right level and function in the organization and that individuals making decisions are informed about the level of legal risk inherent in them. Our Legal team works closely across the entire organization in support of various legal matters, with a primary focus on supporting our global sales teams. We’re looking for individuals who desire exposure to a wide variety of issues and the opportunity to grow alongside a high-growth cybersecurity SaaS business. Where does this role fit in? We are looking for an experienced General Counsel (GC) to lead our in-house legal function to support our evolving needs as we scale our pre-IPO business. Reporting to the COO, the GC will provide global enterprise-wide leadership and forge substantive relationships throughout the company as well as with the company’s external stakeholder groups. This is a perfect position for an ambitious lawyer who wants to lead the Legal function of a consistently scaling business that is defining a category of cybersecurity.

Requirements

10+ years of legal experience, with a strong in-house background at an international, B2B SaaS company
4+ years of experience in a leadership role, managing and building legal teams
Law degree and admission to and in good standing with the local governing body
Exceptional ability to integrate legal, technical, and business perspectives, with proven experience translating complex legal issues into practical, actionable guidance aligned with business and technology objectives.
Deep understanding with sell-side SaaS contracting and experience navigating complicated deals across various deal sizes and buyer types.
Strong interpersonal and cross-functional collaboration skills, with experience providing responsive, business-oriented legal support across global teams, time zones, cultures, and distributed (hybrid/remote) environments.
Significant breadth of knowledge and experience in as many of the following areas as possible: commercial contracts, corporate governance, data security and privacy, AI governance, employment and human resources, intellectual property, marketing (B2B), product, intellectual property, regulatory and trade compliance.
Experience implementing AI tools and workflow automation to enhance legal operations, drive efficiency, and scale support for business needs.

Responsibilities

Act as a strategic legal advisor to executive leadership, proactively identifying risks and opportunities to support informed, high-impact decisions.
Build and scale a technology-enabled legal team, leveraging AI and automation to drive efficiency, optimize workflows, and provide responsive support.
Lead a high-performing B2B SaaS contracting team, implementing scalable processes and metrics-driven practices to accelerate deals and reduce risk.
Provide strategic product counseling to product, engineering, and go-to-market teams, addressing legal issues and enabling successful, compliant product launches.
Develop and oversee a scalable compliance program, covering data privacy (e.g., GDPR, CCPA), OFAC/trade compliance, anti-bribery, AI governance, and ethics.
Manage corporate legal activities, including governance, equity administration, employment matters, M&A, and fundraising.
Direct intellectual property strategy, proactively protecting and managing trademarks, copyrights, patents, and trade secrets.

Benefits

Monthly Lifestyle subsidy: use this for financial, physical and mental wellbeing (all regions)
WFH set-up allowance: to ensure you have the right environment to work in, we will help you get set-up within your first 3 months at UpGuard (all regions)
$1500 USD annual Learning & Development allowance: to support your career development all team members will be able to expense development opportunities against this allowance (all regions)
Generous Annual Leave/PTO allowances: time to recharge your batteries (all regions)
18 weeks paid Parental Leave: irrespective of parenting role (all regions)
Personal Leave allowance: this includes sick & carer’s leave (all regions)
Fully remote working environment: whilst we have physical offices in Sydney & Hobart, we do not mandate compulsory attendance (all regions)
Top spec hardware: all team members will be provided with top-spec laptops for their role (all regions)
Generative AI & Automation tooling: UpGuard provides industry leading generative AI and automation tools to support all team members with their work (all regions)

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