VP of Legal & Privacy

Shine is the financial copilot for entrepreneurs and small business owners.

Founded by serial entrepreneurs Rico Andersen and Martin Hegelund, Shine is a leading European fintech unicorn on a mission to restore the joy of running a business, by ending wasted time on financial admin. Shine offers a connected solution for invoicing, accounting, payroll, business accounts, payments, and financing, meaning business owners can focus their energy on growing a healthy business, not held back by manual admin.

Part of something bigger
Today we're part of Cegid, a European leader in cloud software for finance and accounting. Together we're building Europe's leading financial copilot for small businesses and their accountants.
Shine already supports more than 400,000 small businesses. As part of Cegid, we now reach over one million small businesses and 15,000 accountants across Europe.
We're a multicultural team working from France, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, contributing to a wider European network that spans Spain, Portugal.

Your hiring experience matters
Just as we respect our customers' time, we respect yours. Your experience with Shine and Cegid should feel simple, transparent and genuinely supportive.
If this sounds like somewhere you want to grow, we'd love to hear from you.

Your Role as a VP of Legal and Privacy

The Role we are seeking a highly strategic, commercially minded, and tech-forward VP of Legal & Privacy . Reporting directly to the Chief Legal and Compliance Officer, you will serve as a highly visible strategic advisor to the CEO and Core Leadership team, ensuring legal strategy aligns seamlessly with top-level business objectives. Your ultimate mandate is to transform the legal department from a traditional support function into a true commercial business unit—a strategic game-changer that accelerates product delivery, drives revenue, and provides a distinct competitive advantage for the group. You will lead a distributed, international team of 8 legal professionals, empowering them to execute on day-to-day matters.
While maintaining a practical, growth-focused mindset to drive the department’s strategy and budget, you will personally tackle urgent, high-impact issues to keep the business moving forward, prioritizing actionable outcomes, constantly leveraging AI and automation to deliver faster, leaner legal support. You will also be instrumental in three massive transformational goals:

• Platform & Corporate Consolidation: Guiding the legal strategy for our new unified platform while managing a wide and complex corporate structure of several legal entities under Shine x Cegid.

• European Banking Expansion: Supporting the expansion of our banking product offerings across all our core markets.

• Legal Ops & Process Innovation: Leading the technological transformation of the department, architecting highly innovative processes, and heavily integrating AI to optimize workflows.

What you will do

1. Executive Leadership & Commercial Strategy

• Legal as a Business Unit: Redefine the legal function as a proactive, revenue-enabling business unit. Establish OKRs and KPIs that measure the department's impact on deal velocity, risk mitigation, and commercial growth.

• Strategic Direction & Budget: Define the overarching strategy for the Legal & Privacy department and fully manage its budget, ensuring optimal resource allocation.

• Executive Advising & Group Liaison: Working in lockstep with your manager, provide critical, business-first legal insights to the CEO and Core leadership. Serve as the primary liaison with the shareholders' legal department to maintain seamless alignment at the group level.

• Risk & Performance Reporting: Establish robust, data-driven reporting frameworks to provide leadership with clear, actionable visibility into material legal risks and departmental efficiency.

2. Knowledge Management & Group-Wide Awareness

• Culture of Awareness: Empower your team to design and roll out comprehensive legal, privacy, and IP training programs across all group entities.

• Cross-Functional Enablement: Ensure teammates across Product, Sales, and Tech are equipped with the knowledge and playbooks they need to navigate legal & privacy compliance autonomously, fostering a company-wide culture of proactive risk management.

3. Strategic Legal, IP, & Regulatory Leadership

• High-Stakes Intervention: While your team handles core execution, you will remain hands-on for complex, high-stakes negotiations, make tough strategic arbitrages, and step in for foundational legal analysis when the business demands it.

• External Counsel Optimization: Strategically oversee and optimize the use of outside counsel, managing the external legal budget to ensure cost-effective, high-quality partnerships.

• Intellectual Property: Directly oversee and manage all Intellectual Property (IP) matters for the Group, actively protecting and leveraging our core assets.

• Cross-Border Expansion & Product Unification: Oversee the legal strategy to expand banking services across Europe. Partner with Product & Tech to manage the legal complexities of platform unification.

4. Corporate Governance & Entity Management

• Entity Streamlining: Oversee corporate governance for our legal entities across Europe, delegating execution to your corporate team while maintaining high-level strategic oversight.

• M&A and Restructuring: Provide executive-level legal counsel on corporate structuring, internal mergers, and consolidation efforts as we streamline operations.

5. Process Innovation & Legal Tech

• Innovative Workflows: Continuously deconstruct and rebuild legal processes. Implement innovative, frictionless workflows that eliminate bottlenecks and allow the business to scale rapidly while minimizing the litigations.

• Automation & AI: Champion the procurement and deployment of cutting-edge legal tech. Give your team the automated tools required to execute high-volume tasks faster and more efficiently, allowing them to focus on high-value commercial work.

What you will bring

• Experience: 15+ years of legal experience with a significant portion in a senior leadership role (VP, Head of Legal, or General Counsel) within a high-growth Fintech, SaaS, or Banking environment.

• Commercial Mindset: Demonstrate ability to run a legal department like a business unit, with a proven track record of reporting on legal risks to executive teams, managing budgets, and defining clear OKRs/KPIs.

• Team Leadership & Enablement: Experience managing, mentoring, and scaling distributed, international legal teams, with a strong focus on driving internal knowledge sharing and legal awareness training.

• Regulatory & IP Expertise: Deep understanding of European financial regulations (PSD2/PSD3, E-money), GDPR, commercial SaaS contracting, and Intellectual Property management.

• Corporate Complexity: Proven ability to oversee complex corporate structures (multiple international entities) and guide the legal aspects of M&A or major tech migrations.

• Process & Tech-Savvy: Demonstrated enthusiasm for process innovation and legal technology, with a clear vision for how AI and automation can revolutionize traditional legal workflows.

• Language: Professional fluency in English is mandatory. Fluency in French is highly desirable. Additional European languages are a strong plus.

• Leadership Style: A pragmatic, business-minded problem-solver who balances rigorous risk management with commercial agility, providing clear direction while giving the team the autonomy to execute.

Equal Opportunity Employer

We follow the principle of equal treatment to consider all job applicants and do not discriminate based on their gender, sexual orientation, color, racial or ethnic origin, religion, disability, etc. as per applicable law.

Our recruitment process

• A 30' First call with Recruiting Partner to get to know you better and share more about Shine.

• A 45' Interview with Hiring Manager to discuss your past experiences and the role we are offering.

• A 45' Interview with a member of the Legal & Compliance Team.

• A 90' Business case presentation to highlight your skills and give you a hands-on feel for the role.

• A 45' Business Leaders to gain a deeper understanding of the role and explore how the position will collaborate across Business Units and with the wider organisation.