Senior Legal Counsel

About lemon.markets 🍋

We enable anyone to be an investor. Our mission is to grow investing opportunities for all European customers and businesses. By empowering FinTechs, banks, and wealth managers to offer investment products, we help create financial well-being for their customers.

lemon.markets is a Brokerage-as-a-Service platform: simple digital access to capital markets through a single API. Our API-first infrastructure abstracts brokerage complexity with a well-documented API, a self-service customer operations portal, and a clear regulatory framework, so partners can launch customer-centric, compliant products in weeks, not months.

As part of the dwpbank group, we share a clear goal: we enable anyone to be an investor by making investing in capital markets more accessible. By combining dwpbank’s long-standing expertise and stability with lemon.markets’ technology-first mindset and speed, we are building a modern, modular securities services ecosystem. Together, we offer faster time-to-market, modular services, and a modern customer experience that helps financial service providers stay competitive and respond more flexibly in a changing market.

Your Mission:

At lemon.markets, we're building the infrastructure that powers the next generation of investment products. As we scale, and navigate an incoming wave of new regulations, we need a sharp, experienced legal mind to join our growing Legal team.

This is not a standard in-house legal role. We are a frontrunner in a fast-moving, largely uncharted space, and the legal work reflects that: highly creative, non-standard, and intellectually stimulating at every turn. If you are energised by the idea of helping define what the rulebook looks like rather than just following it, you'll feel right at home here.

You will work closely with our General Counsel and an experienced Legal team, taking on a high degree of personal ownership with strong visibility to senior management, including our Managing Directors and Founder.

You will:

• Own the contract work. The majority of your time will be spent drafting contracts from scratch. Because lemon.markets operates in a non-standard space as an infrastructure provider, templates rarely exist. You'll be creating the language that makes novel investment products legally enforceable.

• Review and negotiate agreements received from partners, clients and counterparties, and represent lemon.markets' interests with confidence in negotiations — including with German-speaking counterparties.

• Enable product development. You act as a critical legal checkpoint for ideas coming from our Product and Sales teams. Your role is to translate innovative concepts into legally feasible and properly documented offerings, or flag where something simply can't be done.

• Monitor regulatory developments particularly in securities law (Wertpapierrecht), capital markets law (Kapitalmarktrecht) and banking law (Bankrecht). Translate regulatory changes into concrete contract language and proactively communicate their impact across the organisation.

• Support the General Counsel in shaping the company's legal strategy, including our European expansion.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with inter alia Compliance, AML, Data Protection, and other teams who will regularly seek your input.

• Advise senior leadership. You'll have direct visibility to the Managing Directors and Founder, both as subject-matter expert and as a deputy to the General Counsel.

You will be successful in this role if:

• You are a fully qualified German lawyer (Volljurist) with strong academic foundations and 3 to 8 years of post-qualification experience (PQE).

• You have solid, hands-on expertise in securities law (Wertpapierrecht), capital markets law (Kapitalmarktrecht), and/or banking law (Bankrecht), ideally gained at a major law firm, Fintech or Banking environment.

• You have strong foundations in contract law and are comfortable by the challenge of drafting agreements where no template exists.

• You operate confidently in both German and English at C1 level (near-native). What matters is your ability to negotiate and advise at the highest level in both languages.

• You are genuinely autonomous: when a task lands on your desk, you drive it forward without waiting to be told.

• You can translate complex legal questions into plain language that engineers, product managers and business teams can understand and act on.

• You are resilient and creative, you won't be rattled by the absence of precedent; instead, you'll see it as an opportunity to think outside the box.

• You enjoy working in a multicultural, interdisciplinary team and thrive in environments where collaboration across functions is part of everyday life.

• You are curious and open-minded, willing to explore adjacent areas of law as our business evolves.

How we take care of you:

• 🚀 Compensation package: We offer you a competitive salary, based on your experience and the value-add you bring to lemon.markets.

• 🕑 Flexible working hours: We trust people to choose when they work best and avoid a rigid 9 to 5 mindset. You decide on the rhythm that helps you do your best work, with only shared core hours from 12:00 to 16:00 to support collaboration.

• 📌 Part-time friendly: This role is part-time friendly, with a minimum commitment of 25 hours/week. We’re flexible and happy to discuss a working model that fits your availability while meeting the needs of the team.

• 🏢 Hybrid work setup: You can work from anywhere in Germany within a hybrid model. At the same time, in-person collaboration is a key part of our culture. That being said, individual contributer lemoneers work 4 days or more per month on-site in our Berlin office, spending quality time together with the team at events, onsites/offsites or over team dinners.

• 📈 Grow with us: We take your personal development seriously! You’ll get regular mentorship and stretch opportunities, a clear career development framework with frequent feedback conversations as well as an annual learning budget.

• 🌱 People & culture: You’ll feel our culture in the small things, like polaroids from our lemoneers’ first day, Friday food market strolls at Maybachufer, and our monthly new-joiner breakfast. But also in the bigger things: celebrating the onboarding of new partners, growing our teams, and owning a strong discussion culture.

• 💛 Perks & benefits: We choose benefits that add actual value. We sponsor a Deutschlandticket for employees on unlimited contracts, plus 50% off on Beatvest - our partner for financial education and investing.

• 🏝 Workation: Get out of here! At lemon.markets you can work remotely from anywhere in the EU for up to 10 consecutive days at a time, and up to 60 days per year in total.

As an equal opportunity employer, lemon.markets is committed to building an inclusive workplace. The company welcomes people from all different backgrounds, including age, citizenship, ethnic and racial origins, gender identities, individuals with disabilities, marital status, religions and ideologies, and sexual orientations to apply.

If you feel this role could be a great match for you even if you don’t tick every box, we’d still love to hear from you, please apply.

You have any questions? Feel free to contact us via [email protected]