Senior Legal Counsel

Summary

Wikimedia envisions a world where the sum total of human knowledge is available to everyone.  The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit home of Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and other free educational projects, serves as the hub of a global movement of hundreds of thousands of contributors collaborating to collect and share the sum of all human knowledge with the world. Protecting the privacy of Wikimedia readers, contributors, and donors is a key element of our work as an organization.

Our Legal team counsels the Foundation as they create tools and features for Wikipedia, secure the websites, and collaborate with volunteer developers to design and build the future of the projects. We are looking for Senior Legal Counsel to support the Fundraising, Product and Engineering teams in a product counsel capacity, with a special focus on marketing and product development needs across departments. 

Description

As the Senior Legal Counsel, you will be responsible for providing holistic in-house legal guidance to the Fundraising, Product, and Engineering teams, ensuring the Foundation can innovate while protecting the privacy of its global community. In this role, you will navigate evolving regulations in marketing and AI, advise on the development of the Wikimedia technical platform, and help build a global legal ecosystem where free knowledge can thrive.

This role reports to the Associate General Counsel and will focus on Wikimedia’s current and future legal work as it relates to marketing and fundraising engagement, and disintermediation.

You are responsible for:

• Analyzing current and forthcoming regulations related to marketing, customization, and other fundraising initiatives to support Advancement, Product and Technology teams on marketing and mobile app development
• Collaborating with the Foundation's lawyers and public policy professionals to address the impact of Generative AI and create a global legal ecosystem in which free knowledge can thrive with minimal disintermediation
• Identifying and executing opportunities to advance the Wikimedia mission within a complex, shifting technological and legal landscape
• Supporting the Product and Engineering teams in developing a data governance model that allows for novel features while maintaining high privacy standards, for example in the space of reader engagement

Skills and Experience:

• J.D. from accredited U.S. law school or equivalent foreign degree preferably paired with significant U.S. legal experience
• Experience with product, privacy, marketing and other internet