Senior Legal Counsel (London)

About Clear Street: Clear Street is modernising the brokerage ecosystem. Founded in 2018, Clear Street is a diversified financial services firm replacing the legacy infrastructure used across capital markets. We started from scratch by building a completely cloud-native clearing and custody system designed for today’s complex, global market. Clear Street’s proprietary prime brokerage platform adds significant efficiency to the market, while focusing on minimising risk, redundancy, and cost for clients. Our goal is to create a single source-of-truth platform for every asset class, in every country, and in any currency. By combining highly-skilled product and engineering talent with seasoned finance professionals, we are building the essentials to compete in today’s fast-paced markets.

The Role: We are looking to hire a Senior Legal Counsel for our UK and European business. This will be an opportunity for a highly experienced individual to establish this function locally.

The Team: Clear Street’s mission is to become a single-source platform that serves a variety of investor types across multiple asset classes on a global scale. The Clear Street U.K. team is bringing Clear Street’s established equities, futures and options, and fixed-income prime brokerage business to a new market.

Responsibilities: The responsibilities of this role include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Negotiate equity and fixed income trading agreements with major market participants (banks and hedge funds in the US, UK, and Asia), including ISDAs, MRAs/GMRAs, MSLAs/GMSLAs, master netting agreements, prime brokerage and margin lock-up agreements, custody and clearing contracts, and clearing agreements.
• Interface with, and draft responses to the FCA (UK), AFM (Amsterdam), MAS (Singapore), and other regulatory/self-regulatory authorities in respect of the company’s activities – futures, equity trading, prime brokerage and securities finance, and clearing.
• Provide legal counsel and guidance to officers and executive management on legal matters relevant to the business of the company including client complaints, litigation (general) and employment law.
• Draft, review, and negotiate complex commercial agreements, including market data agreements, commercial leases, technology supplier agreements, and services provider agreements. As necessary, ensure contracts comply with applicable regulatory requirements.
• Support the firm’s global expansion into the UK, EU, Canada, India, and Singapore, focusing on the commercial and legal challenges of establishing a presence in foreign jurisdictions.
• Ensure the firm’s purpose, values, and strategy are being met and aligned with the firm’s culture and business objectives, as established by the Board.

Skills required:

• Must have at least 10 years’ experience in financial services law with extensive experience of FCA rules, FSMA and MIFID; knowledge of EMIR, SFTR and GDPR highly desirable.
• Exposure to and experience with Dutch/EU law and regulators advantageous.
• Experience in dealing with institutional trading counterparties, ranging in a wide variety of agreement types.
• Confident communicator with the ability to quickly build relationships with internal stakeholders and counterparties.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot and problem solve in a creative and innovative manner.

We Offer: At Clear Street, we offer competitive compensation packages, company equity, pension, gender neutral parental leave, and full medical and dental insurance. Our belief has always been that we are better as a business when we are all together in person. As such, we are requiring employees to be in the office a minimum of three days per week. Our top priority is our people. We’re continuously investing in a culture that promotes collaboration. We help each other through challenges and celebrate each other's successes. We believe that modern workplaces succeed by virtue of having high-performance workforces that are diverse — in ideas, in cultures, and in experiences. We put in the effort to make such a workplace a daily reality and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.