Director - Product and Privacy Counsel

About The Role:

As Director, Product & Privacy this person will serve in a key leadership capacity on both the Legal team at the broader Apollo.io leadership team. As a rapidly scaling company, you will have particular skill and aptitude for operationalizing key processes and building scalable solutions for continued success of Legal initiatives at Apollo, including but not limited to a focus on scaling product counseling processes alongside our product and engineering teams. You will be the resident expert for all things privacy and privacy compliance with a mandate for operationalizing our privacy needs, particularly within our product offerings. Successful candidates will be natural builders, delighting in educating and in building relationships of trust throughout the business. Cross-functional collaboration will be a crucial part of your day-to-day job as you work to educate, iterate and find efficiency wins in how we operate at scale. The focus of this role will be on product & privacy needs, but for the right candidate the remit may be broader, initially or over time. This is a 100% remote position (with the likelihood of optional travel to team and/or industry events), and will report to our GC You will:

• Be the company’s go-to privacy expert and resource on all things privacy and product as we scale

• Manage a team of privacy and product counsel and privacy analysts and compliance professionals 

• Advise product, engineering, operations, and marketing teams on meeting strategic objectives while complying with laws, regulations, best practices, and customer requirements

• Build the product and privacy counseling function within the Apollo legal team, including processes and operations, working closely with product leadership and product pods in developing best-in-class methods for legal and privacy review of our product development process

• Build and maintain a privacy compliance program that scales to meet changing global regulations

• Design, implement, and iterate on policies, processes, and procedures to improve the legal team’s engagement model with the product and engineering organizations

• Work closely with Apollo’s security team on shared goals and objectives

• Support the commercial legal function and the go-to-market teams in escalated privacy-related contracting questions and help enable the commercial legal function with up-to-date templates and strategies as it relates to privacy

• Develop training materials and conduct training sessions for product and business teams

• Monitor legal and regulatory developments, think ahead, see around corners, and help prepare for and minimize risks that may arise in the future 

• Serve as a general deputy for all matters facing the Legal team, able and willing to advise on a broader remit as business needs require 

Key Responsibilities:

• Continue to build and maintain a right-sized privacy compliance program, including maintaining compliance as a registered data broker and working directly with our external DPO provider

• Continue to develop our product review and product counseling process to ensure legal and/or security review is obtained prior to new product features and launches (product team partnership)

• Instill a culture of privacy-by-design through trainings, product counseling processes, and new compliance-related requirements (product & engineering team partnerships)

• Serve in a leadership capacity advising our internal legal counsel and support team members on the data subject access request (DSAR) process, leveraging automation and metrics wherever possible

• Create and maintain data-mapping, risk registers, and other ongoing documentation of the company’s current processes and areas of focus

• Support the enhancement of customer trust and negotiation of customer contracts, including through automation of  our repository of FAQs for our go-to-market (GTM) teams that covers accurate and vetted responses to most frequently asked questions related to our product and privacy

• Build and maintain the product and privacy compliance roadmap that tracks, and makes progress against, key privacy related goals and projects, including leading key project planning initiatives with our product and engineering teams 

• Serve as a team leader in working with our security, fraud, and IT teams on incident response and vendor risk management

• Advise on frontier technologies relative to our product plans, including but not limited to AI, large language model usage, and other integration of third party products into our product offerings 

Qualifications:

• JD and a member of a relevant U.S. state bar in good standing, with ability to obtain status as a registered in-house counsel with the California bar if required

• At least 8+ years of law firm and in-house experience

• Demonstrated experience counseling technology product teams, especially those working B2B with significant privacy-related aspects to their products and operations

• Prior experience managing team and the ability to go both low and high in terms of acting as both an individual contributor and a leader 

• Deep subject matter expertise and prior work counseling on global privacy compliance and emerging regulations in privacy and related fields such as MarTech and AdTech

• Demonstrated experience counseling on intellectual property issues related to data use

• Experience managing and developing other attorneys and analysts and leading a product counseling and/or privacy compliance function, particularly from an operational and process lens

• An ability to translate between business and technical risk and communicate clearly to business and technical constituencies

• A belief and practice that no task is too big or too small

• Self-initiative that drives a desire for impact and achievement

• A pragmatic approach to getting things and ability to prioritize and re-prioritize as needed

• Builder-mentality - a roll-up your sleeves attitude to tackle with a collaborative, low-ego approach to collaborating across the organization.

• Comfort with fast-paced environments

• A sense of humor and, above all else, a positive attitude

Preferred, but not required:

• Experience managing litigation and/or regulatory enforcement

• A familiarity and comfort with the latest in privacy software and privacy technology

• Interest and aptitude for privacy thought leadership on social, industry channels and more

• Prior experience with international compliance issues more broadly