Senior Legal Counsel

About Morpho

Morpho is a leading Decentralized Finance (DeFi) lending protocol that recently secured $50 million in funding from Ribbit Capital, a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Variant, Brevan Howard, Pantera, Blocktower, and 50 others to support its mission of revolutionizing lending with an open, efficient, and resilient platform. Morpho is experiencing explosive growth, with over $11 billion in assets supplied on the protocol, solidifying itself as the new standard for DeFi lending. Now, Morpho is scaling its team of contributors to establish itself as a cornerstone - not just of DeFi, but of a new internet-native financial system.

Location

Paris or Remote in France, with the ability to frequently travel to Paris

Mission & Responsibilities

Morpho is looking for a Legal leader to play a pivotal role in shaping its legal function and strategy and creating an environment where creativity and innovation thrive. As Morpho’s Senior Legal Counsel, you will oversee the full spectrum of legal matters, supporting and empowering the business to achieve its goals. You will work closely with leadership on high-impact projects and strategic decision-making.

Deals Management (30-40%)

• Team Coordination: coordinating with the different teams (Growth, Integration, Marketing) to understand the business needs and priorities

• Term Sheet management: pro-actively thinking of terms that align with Morpho’s business goals and mitigate main risks

• Contract negotiation: negotiating and closing high stake partnerships with large Tier 1 institutions

Product & Regulatory across the stack (terms of use, memos, third-party agreements) (25%)

• Producing and delivering documents that can support the Morpho ecosystem in understanding the regulatory context and build confidence into our product

• Working closely with the Product team to reflect this in the products (terms of use, warnings, wordings, etc)

• Providing legal support answers when asked by actors of the ecosystem

Corporate, Tax (25%)

• Corporate: global entity structure

• Working closely with the Head of Finance to provide advice on complex tax treatments, with the support of specialized counsel

Everything Else Legal & Team Support (10-20%)

• Creating strong relationships with the team to ensure they involve you in all crucial topics requiring legal support

• Be a trusted and business-facilitating partner by providing assistance where needed (IP, labour law, consumer law, data privacy, etc) and ensuring nothing blocks delivering.

Must-have Experience & Skills 

• 5-10 years of professional experience, including as an in-house lawyer in a Fintech startup, CEX, or crypto/web3 project

• Generalist, comfortable working on a variety of topics that stretch across regulatory, IP, commercial, corporate, tax, etc.

• Use of crypto on a personal level

• Proven ability to be business-oriented and support company growth initiatives

• Strong negotiation skills, experience negotiating business deals, with a strong business acumen

• Experience with French/EU regulations and legal frameworks, ideally speaks French

• Fluency in French

Soft Skills

• Comfortable providing legal advice in areas where regulation is still evolving

• Team-oriented, collaborative, and able to create strong relationships with all teams

• Startup agility: “no task too small”, can get operational when needed, strong bias for action

• Strong communicator, makes legal concepts accessible, and adapts to their audience

• Low Ego, high ownership

Ready to shape the future of finance?

We are looking forward to receiving your application.