Head of Legal

Head of Legal

• Employment type: Permanent or 12 month fixed term contract

• Reporting to: Chief Financial Officer

• Visa sponsorship: UK national or visa holder preferred, but not a dealbreaker

• Salary: £90,000 - £110,000

• Location / working pattern: Hybrid, 3 days in office

• Background checks: Due to the non-partisan nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history, and right to work. To ensure we maintain high standards of political neutrality, we also perform media and social media checks.

About Apolitical

Apolitical's mission is to make governments smarter for people and the planet and we reach over 40 million public servants through our partnerships with governments globally. We are the largest global network for governments, used by 500,000+ public servants in 170 countries to find and share best practices and gain skills on critical topics from AI to climate change to emerging technologies.

Governments use Apolitical to solve public sector transformation challenges from AI augmentation to reskilling. We offer governments five interoperable components: research and analysis, workforce productivity tools, customisable training, vibrant learning communities and high impact convenings. Everything we do is powered by our unique global network and real-time data.

Apolitical is trusted by 60+ governments and leading organisations that work with governments. Governments include schools of government, departments, ministries and government adjacent bodies in the UK, Canada, India, EU, UAE, Brazil, Ethiopia, Singapore and more. Global foundation partners include the Bezos Earth Fund, Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, who view governments as key stakeholders in achieving systemic change.

Apolitical’s corporate partners include organisations such as Google, AWS and Microsoft who work with us at scale with governments and public sector bodies worldwide.

Our flagship AI platform, Futura, helps governments identify where AI can make a difference and equips public servants with personalised learning to put it into practice. PolicyNova and PolicyNavigator support evidence-based policy research, while our Government AI Campus and Frontier Science & Tech and Resilience Platforms provide practical learning to help public servants respond to emerging challenges.

The Role

Every partnership we sign runs on a contract, and the products we build raise questions of data protection, AI regulation and intellectual property. Today, much of our specialist legal work goes to external counsel. As Apolitical grows, our priority is to sign and deliver partnerships with legal risk understood and managed internally.

As Head of Legal, you will take ownership of our legal function as our most senior legal hire to date. Your immediate mandate is to design and install best practice across our legal work, extend it with AI, and centralise how we manage and mitigate legal risk.

This is a senior, hands-on role: you will be our only lawyer, doing the legal work yourself, with no direct reports for at least 9 months. You will work closely with Commercial, Delivery, Product and Finance, and often lead the legal side of negotiations alongside our CFO and CEO, sharing ownership of the outcomes.

You will:

• Lead legal negotiations: draft and negotiate our partnership, licensing, software, supplier and grant agreements, and lead the legal side of negotiations with governments and public bodies, including procurement and tender terms, as our commercial team brings deals towards signature.

• Set our contracting standards: own the templates, playbooks and negotiating positions that let us contract quickly and consistently, and the tracking of obligations, renewals and expiry dates after signature.

• Own legal risk and governance: hold one view of our legal and regulatory risk, advise the executive team and board on it, and support board and shareholder matters, fundraising, equity transactions and disputes.

• Keep us compliant as we innovate: advise on data protection, AI regulation and intellectual property as we build AI-enabled products, and own our legal policies and platform terms.

• Build the legal function: decide what we handle in-house and what goes to external counsel, manage external counsel within budget, and give teams the guidance to handle routine matters themselves.

• Extend legal work with AI: own our legal systems and AI-enabled tools, and use them to increase what a one-person legal function can deliver.

Onboarding Milestones

Within your first month, you'll:

• Develop a clear understanding of our partners, products and pipeline, and the agreements behind them, working with Commercial and Delivery.

• Assess our templates, contract records, external counsel arrangements and legal tools.

• Identify the legal risks and priorities that need attention first, and agree them with our CFO.

Within three months, you'll:

• Be leading the legal side of our most significant negotiations alongside our commercial team.

• Have taken ownership of our contract templates and standard negotiating positions.

• Have agreed which work you'll handle in-house and which will go to external counsel.

Within six months, you'll:

• Have one clear view of our main legal and regulatory risks, reported to the executive team and board.

• Be the final legal decision-maker within an agreed risk appetite, and the first port of call for Commercial, Partnerships and Delivery, Product and Finance.

• Have guidance and AI-enabled tools in place that let teams handle routine legal matters themselves.

About you

You will be a qualified solicitor with substantial commercial experience. Having worked in-house will make a real difference in this role, because you'll be setting up how legal works at Apolitical as well as doing the work.

You'll thrive here if you:

• Have led commercial negotiations with large counterparties and found terms that work for both sides.

• Can explain legal risk in plain language and give a clear recommendation, not just a list of options.

• Are comfortable being the only lawyer in the room, making the call and knowing when to bring in specialist advice.

• Adapt your approach quickly across very different partners, from government ministries to foundations and corporates.

• Build templates, guidance and tools that let others handle routine work, rather than keeping everything with you.

• Are driven by the possibilities of AI, both in the regulation you advise on and the tools you use.

• Want your legal expertise to help governments serve people and the planet better.

Show us in your CV if you have:

• Experience in an in-house legal role at a scale-up or similar organisation, ideally as a seasoned Senior Legal Counsel or as Head of Legal.

• Six or more years' post-qualification experience.

• Experience negotiating contracts with governments, public bodies or international organisations, including public procurement.

• Experience advising on AI regulation and data protection for technology products.

Don't meet every requirement? Studies show that women and people of colour are less likely to apply for roles unless they meet every qualification. We're committed to building a diverse and inclusive team, so if you're interested in the role but don't tick every box, we'd still encourage you to apply.

This probably isn't the role for you if…

• You're seeking to lead a team straight away. For now this is a one-person function, and you'll be doing the legal work yourself.

• You prefer a narrow specialism. You'll move between contracts, data protection, AI regulation, governance and disputes, often in the same week.

• You're looking for an established legal department with settled processes. We're building ours and you'll shape them.

Our application process

We use skills-based assessments and structured interviews to focus on what predicts success in the role. Each stage is designed to give us high-quality evidence of your skills, judgement and ways of working, while giving you a clear view of the role, the team and what working at Apolitical is like.

You can see more about the stages of our hiring process on our careers page.

You can expect to hear from us, no matter the outcome, by 6th November 2026.

Using AI in your application

We embrace new technologies and encourage the use of AI in our work.

You're welcome to use AI tools to help structure and refine your application. What matters to us, though, is understanding your thinking, experience and perspective, so please make sure your application still sounds like you.