Lead Legal Counsel

Your role

Cloover is the financial infrastructure behind Europes energy transition. We finance residential solar, batteries and heat pumps through 500+ installers across five EU markets, moving around EUR 10M a month against EUR 1.2bn of committed funding.

Consumer credit is a regulated business, and Cloover is about to be regulated in more places. Today the licensing work, the installer contracts and every hard call sit with outside counsel and with the CEOs inbox. As our first legal and regulatory, you wont inherit an existing playbook, you will define how legal and regulatory work is done at Cloover and build the team behind it. You will drive market expansion and own high-impact regulatory work that directly determines which European markets we can enter, rather than basic compliance housekeeping. You will take ownership of both halves of the legal domain, obtaining regulatory licenses across new markets and owning the legal side of every contract we sign. You will be the foundational hire for the function, with your first legal analyst joining within 6 to 12 months.

Youll report to the CEO/CFO and work closely with institutional lenders, banks and complex financing structures.

Your mission

General counsel matters

Cover the legal work Cloover needs day to day: commercial contracts, corporate questions, employment matters, governance, disputes, policies, and risk decisions.

Own the contract estate: installer and partner agreements, customer terms, funding, receivables and lender documentation.

Draft and negotiate directly, alongside the finance and commercial teams.

Keep contract templates current and maintain an organized contract register.

Financial, regulatory and compliance

Lead Cloovers financial and regulatory legal work across Europe and other markets: licensing route selection, applications, regulatory analysis, and the workplan behind it.

Build the compliance, policy and governance suite from the ground up.

Track consumer credit and financial services regulation as it moves, including CCD II in Germany, and translate these changes into actionable business operations.

Be a credible counterpart for regulators, financing partners, banks and outside counsel.

External resources and team building

Choose, instruct, and control outside counsel and advisors across markets. Set the scope, hold the budget, and judge output quality.

Bring the answers back in-house rather than routing every question out.

Hire and lead an analyst within 6 to 12 months, and build the legal and compliance function from there.

Your profile

8-10+ years in a regulated financial services environment (consumer credit, lending, payments or fintech), including time in-house rather than advisory work only.

You have drafted and negotiated commercial contracts as the principal: you owned the redline, the fallback positions and the final call, with no supervising partner behind you.

You have built regulatory frameworks yourself, not only advised on them. This includes policies you wrote, applications you assembled, and positions you defended to a regulator, auditor, or lender.

You are able and willing to hold a named regulatory officeholder role where a regulator requires one. If you have held or been approved for one, tell us which role and in which jurisdiction.

You are comfortable being the only lawyer in the room, and you say no in writing when it matters.

Excellent written and spoken English, our working language.

Based in Berlin and energized by being in the room. Were intentionally office-first: decisions get made in real time, prototypes get stress-tested over lunch, and the founding team is ten meters away. If thats how you thrive, youll feel at home here.