Principal Counsel, Data & Privacy

Overview

The Foundation is the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. We believe people everywhere should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives, and our employees should reflect the diversity of the populations we serve. We offer a comprehensive benefits package and a range of programs to support employees and their families, including medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, retirement contributions, holidays, and opportunities to engage in employee communities.

We are committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.

The Team

Guidance, Solutions, Integrity describes the Legal division’s approach to providing responsive legal guidance, supporting the foundation’s mission and the implementation of programmatic and operational strategies. The Legal team delivers comprehensive legal services by providing efficient and reliable guidance, managing legal risk, and supporting the development of solutions to achieve the foundation’s mission and its affiliated entities. The Legal team collaborates with colleagues across the foundation and its affiliated entities to enable mission-driven work by maintaining an efficient, well-run global organization where employees can thrive.

This requires effective collaboration, strong alignment, and thoughtful planning across both operational and programmatic teams, with shared accountability for mitigating risk and optimizing the foundation’s resources.

We are seeking a seasoned privacy attorney to support our enterprise data privacy program and provide legal guidance across the foundation and its subsidiaries (currently, Gates Medical Research Institute, Gates Philanthropic Partners, and Gates Agricultural Innovations) on processes, transactions, and initiatives relating to personal data, data access and sharing, information management, and data governance. This position supports teams as they develop and implement strategies and technologies to achieve operational effectiveness and enable charitable impact.

• Support a global data privacy program, including global compliance, policy and guidance, notices and legal bases, data subject requests, data processing agreements, records of processing activities, data impact assessments, and transfer impact assessments.
• Continuously identify and implement process and tooling improvements to enhance data privacy program maturity and efficiency.
• Provide legal guidance regarding a variety of enterprise data privacy issues.
• Provide tactical and strategic legal guidance regarding the processing of personal data, including compliance, data classification, data protection, lifecycle management, and data governance.
• Translate legal requirements into plain language policies, processes, and guidance that are risk-based, practical, and scalable.
• Review, draft, and negotiate data-related agreements and terms, and develop related templates, playbooks, guidance, and processes.
• Develop and deliver effective training across all functions, offices, and levels of the foundation and its subsidiaries.
• Collaborate with technical, operational, and programmatic teams to translate privacy principles and responsible AI principles into pragmatic solutions.
• Work with colleagues, outside counsel, and third parties across jurisdictions, cultures, time zones, and collaboration tools.
• Integrate AI/ML tools into daily work to streamline research, drafting, and collaboration.

• JD degree and current bar membership in good standing.
• At least 15 years’ legal experience, with a primary focus on data privacy.
• Extensive experience with leading or advising global data privacy programs.
• Extensive experience with GDPR/UK GDPR and at least one major US data protection framework (e.g., HIPAA or FERPA).
• Demonstrated experience negotiating simple to complex data-related transactions, including data licenses, data protection addenda, and data sharing agreements.
• Demonstrated experience managing outside counsel across jurisdictions and translating legal advice into practical, operational, risk-based…