General Counsel

About Acala

Acala's mission is to build and nurture the autonomous financial infrastructure of the decentralized web. Delivering on this mission will bring more financial accessibility, opportunity, and prosperity to everyone on the planet through a new, open financial system. Our core project is the Acala Network itself, which we expect to become the de facto DeFi parachain and stablecoin of the Polkadot ecosystem. Polkadot provides the underlying trust primitives to our parachain, upon which we’ve built our suite of financial primitives including; decentralized, multi-collateral stablecoin; trustless staking derivatives, and Decentralized Exchange. These primitives will be used by us and other teams to power open DeFi innovations, and remove the need for the intermediaries that inhabit almost every conventional trust-based financial system. We have secured our support from eminent backers like Polychain, Coinbase Venture, Pantera and many more. Acala began its launch process on December 18, 2021, and we've got regular product launches and tokenomic incentive programs planned throughout 2022, so there’s no better time to join the DeFi mission and be a part of the future that we’re building...because we're building it for you, too. NB: For the fastest response to any of our positions, apply directly on our website: acala.network/jobs

About the Role:

TLDR: A part-time fully remote role for an internal GC familiar with fintech practices in Singapore and its regulatory bodies. This is the first General Counsel role at Acala. Ahead of our upcoming Polkadot launch, and the subsequent wave of integrations with other blockchain teams and payment service providers that will follow it, Acala has outlined its internal legal strategy for 2022. Although we intend to continue (and grow) our working relationships with our outsourced legal services partners in many regions of the world, we need an experienced pair of hands into which we can place the reins of this legal strategy. We also anticipate an increase in the number of patent and regulation issues that we'll encounter, and we're determined to take action to prepare for them. In this role you will have three primary responsibilities; Legal Adviser to the C-Level founding team; Principal Liaison to our external legal partners; Researcher into the nitty-gritty detail of fintech patent law and 'best practice' methods for integration efforts (think 'when Uber met Visa' and you're on the right track). To be successful in each of these three respects you'll need a background not only on the frontlines of technology legal practice, but also that of the finance / payments industry. Experience working as an internal legal counsel for a technology startup will be highly advantageous, but is not an absolute requisite. If you've negotiated similar legal cases before, and are as invested in a blockchain-based future are we are, then we want to hear from you. Competitive Salary | 10-20 hours per week | Contract | Remote anywhere This position: https://jobs.lever.co/acala/bfeae50c-86f5-46c2-9973-44281ecc9262

What you'll do

• Oversee and help to shape our international legal strategy, via any means necessary
• Proactively identify and overcome the obstacles we face in 2022 and beyond
• Navigate the emergent legal trends in the blockchain industry to sharpen your legal advice to us
• Draft, review and maintain contractual documents and legal disclaimers
• Manage day-to-day legal operations within the company (contractual agreements, etc.)

What it takes

• License to practice law in APAC jurisdiction(s), Singapore preferable
• 3+ years minimum legal experience in International Finance
• 1 year minimum in-house legal counsel experience
• Experience with mature stage startups
• Strong knowledge of fintech practices, and digital assets or tokens
• All the other sexy stuff around drafting & redrafting regulatory contracts

What we offer

• Competitive contract-based compensation (you'll have to invoice us from wherever you are)
• Flexible working hours within Pacific timezones
• Collaborative, transparent and empowering work culture
• Meaningful work on creating better technologies for a fairer future
• Opportunity to work in a multinational, high-performance team with diverse backgrounds

NB: For the fastest response to any of our positions, apply directly on our website: acala.network/jobs. For more information on this position, our employment conditions, or anything related to working for Acala, get in touch with our Talent Manager: simon@acala.network

Our Team

With approximately 50 full-time team members working across 8 different countries, our team is truly decentralised. We’re some of the leading blockchain innovators, Substrate & Rust engineers, full-stack dApp developers, & Economist Analysts. But we're just people like you, working from our shared desire for a fairer and more inclusive financial system, in direct contrast to the clear shortcomings of the current institutions that run our world.

Our Values

The community we’re building is shaped by our values and fuelled by the needs of all humans: - Inclusion, Care, Trust, and Respect - Empowerment - Guidance and Support - Friendship, Community, Real Relationships 

We’re building Acala based on a core set of values we believe are in line with the tenets of web3:

- True decentralisation - Less Trust, More Truth - Integrity - Accountability - Empowering individuals with more autonomy 

What We Have Achieved

Acala was founded in 2019 as an early Web3 Foundation grant recipient, and is an ecosystem and education partner of both the W3F and Polkadot. Throughout 2021 we have proven ourselves to be the DeFi hub(s) of the Polkadot Ecosystem & Community by securing the first crowdloan-funded parachain slots on both the Polkadot & Kusama blockchain networks. But even at this, our true work has only just begun... NOTE: To all external Recruiters who have 'exciting profiles' to share with us, please do so knowing that without signed terms & conditions Acala deem any introductions made to be a complimentary courtesy to the development of the world's Web3 infrastructure. Thank you for your support.