Head of Legal

About us

Sky–formerly MakerDAO–is the ecosystem behind the Sky Protocol, one of the most established and trusted decentralized finance protocols, operating since 2017. Backed by $15B TVL across the Ecosystem and over $200M in annual earnings, the protocol ranks among the top five in DeFi. With over 7-year security track record, over $11B combined native stablecoin in circulation, it’s powered by the cutting-edge Sky Agents Framework for autonomous and scalable operations (learn more: Sky 2025, Sky Primitives: The building blocks of the Sky Agent Framework, Overview of Sky Mechanics).

Sky Frontier Foundation is the innovation and acceleration arm of Sky – built to accelerate its growth and unlock new frontiers in DeFi, AI, and digital finance. Sky Frontier incubates new Sky Agents, funds breakthrough technologies, and bridges DeFi with AI-powered systems. Working with Sky Frontier means shaping the architecture of tomorrow’s financial systems while moving at the pace of frontier innovation.

The role

We're seeking a Head of Legal to build and lead Sky Frontier Foundation's legal function. This senior leader will design the operating architecture that keeps a lean, high-quality team scalable and ahead of the organisation's needs - while carrying a real legal workload across a fast-moving, multi-jurisdictional ecosystem.

The strategic objective and primary focus of this role is to architect a legal function built for hypergrowth where operational excellence is the foundation, rigour protects the ecosystem, and the team moves at the speed of the ecosystem.

This role requires a qualified lawyer who is also a builder: equally comfortable drafting a complex agreement and designing the system that ensures every agreement gets handled consistently, on time, and within budget.

The Head of Legal will be a senior member of SFF's legal team, reporting to the General Counsel & Director and working closely with ecosystem stakeholders, the Board, and external counsel.

What you’ll do

Strategic objective: Architect a legal function built for hypergrowth - where operational excellence is the foundation, rigour protects the ecosystem, and the team moves at the speed of the ecosystem.

Legal operations and architecture

• Design and own the end-to-end legal operating architecture - intake, triage, matter assignment, tracking, and close-out. Select the right tooling and be accountable for a workflow that is efficient by design.

• Manage a substantive legal workload spanning contracts, vendor agreements, entity maintenance, filings, and advisory across ecosystem stakeholders.

• Build and maintain a searchable precedent library converting the team's accumulated work into reusable institutional knowledge.

Team leadership and talent strategy

• Develop a forward-looking hiring strategy built around maximising the output of a small number of high-quality people. Define what each future hire unlocks and how they fit into a coherent, high-performing team.

• Lead and develop junior counsel - allocating work, managing capacity proactively, and investing in professional growth across the team.

External counsel management

• Scope external counsel mandates with precision, establish budget parameters, and track spend against forecast. Move the function toward tightly defined work packages rather than open-ended retainers.

• Manage day-to-day external counsel relationships, review invoices critically, and ensure every engagement delivers clear value for spend.

Reporting and governance

• Produce clear operational metrics covering open matters, cycle times, external spend, and capacity - providing the General Counsel and Board with reliable visibility into function health.

• Identify resourcing gaps, workflow bottlenecks, and emerging legal risks before they escalate, and bring structured solutions to the General Counsel.

What you’ll bring

• Qualified lawyer with 7–10+ years PQE, with proven experience architecting legal operating systems in high-growth environments.

• A track record of building and leading lean legal teams, managing external counsel spend, and treating operational clarity as a professional standard.

• Project management instincts and a tech-forward mindset: you improve legal output through systems and tooling, not just effort.

• Crypto/DeFi/Web3 awareness.

•Background in corporate or transactional law, with exposure to financing transactions, capital markets, or cross-jurisdictional structures.