Head of Legal @ Mission Driven SaaS

Head of Legal @ Mission Driven SaaS Company

This range is provided by Whistler Partners. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

$/yr - $/yr

Owner provides a suite of tools designed to assist local restaurant owners in enhancing their sales and online visibility. The platform features solutions like mobile ordering and customer rewards, which aim to improve customer engagement. Additionally, Owner offers a free website grading tool that helps restaurants evaluate their online presence.

Owner is hiring our first Head of Legal to build, scale, and lead the Legal function from the ground up. As our business accelerates — expanding product surfaces, navigating regulatory expectations, entering strategic partnerships, and shaping the future of restaurant technology — we need a legal leader who can operate with speed, clarity, and judgment.

This is a foundational role. You will own our full legal stack: corporate, compliance, employment, IP, and litigation. You will drive our most sensitive initiatives as the accountable DRI, while also architecting the systems, processes, and norms that allow Legal to scale. You will be supported by excellent outside counsel across domains, but your superpower is knowing when to leverage firms versus when to move fast internally.

Success in this role looks like being a proactive, strategic, and embedded legal partner who sees around corners and builds durable foundations.

This role is ideal for a builder with both firm and in‑house experience who is energized by being hands‑on, creating structure from ambiguity, and shaping a world‑class Legal function from day one.

• Report directly to the CFO while partnering with leadership teams across Engineering, Product & Design (EPD), GTM, People, Finance, Ops, and the Executive team.
• Act as a strategic partner to the CEO on sensitive legal negotiations and litigation matters, with an expectation of progressing conversations independently.
• Manage and direct a network of top‑tier outside counsel across corporate, regulatory, product, employment, and litigation.
• Build and scale Owner’s Legal function as the company’s first full‑time legal hire, establishing the frameworks, tooling, and operating norms that enable rapid growth.
• Serve as strategic DRI on the company’s most sensitive and high‑impact matters, including litigation strategy, negotiations, regulatory posture, and complex commercial agreements.
• Partner closely with Product and Engineering to ensure new products, pricing models, integrations, and financial infrastructure are built with compliance and risk minimization in mind.
• Design scalable systems across contracting, compliance, employment, corporate governance, privacy, and IP, ensuring clarity, speed, and auditability.
• Lead Owner’s litigation strategy end‑to‑end, including outside counsel engagement, negotiation posture, documentation, and executive communication.
• Proactively identify risk areas across the business and build policies, processes, and internal education to mitigate them before they become issues.
• Support strategic partnerships/transactions, board matters, fundraising, corporate governance, and investor communications.
• Establish the legal architecture needed for Owner’s next phase of scale, creating the foundations for a function that can grow alongside the business.
• Earn deep trust across the organization by combining clarity of judgment with a bias to action, moving fast while elevating Owner’s risk standards.

• 8–10 years of legal experience, ideally with experience in both law firm and in‑house environments.
• A full‑stack legal athlete with experience across commercial, corporate, compliance, IP, employment, and litigation management.
• A builder mentality – excited to design legal systems, implement processes, and establish standards.
• A proactive operator with a strong bias to action, capable of serving as DRI for mission‑critical company priorities.
• Exceptional judgment and the ability to see around corners, providing not just legal answers but strategic guidance aligned with Owner’s long‑term goals.
• Com…