Paralegal / Legal Engineer

Summary

We're looking for an early-career legal professional to help drive how Legal works at Dust. You'll shape and build legal processes and tools, and you'll get directly involved in a broad range of commercial legal matters, working under the supervision of Dust's lawyers. This role combines legal engineering and process improvement with hands-on experience in commercial contracting, including customer, vendor and partner matters. With a view to qualifying as a solicitor, the role may lead to consideration for an England & Wales training contract, subject to performance, business needs, eligibility and formal approval. A training contract is a potential pathway, not a guarantee.

What you'll do

Drive legal engineering and process improvement

• Identify recurring legal bottlenecks and design better ways for the company to get legal support.
• Translate legal rules and approved playbooks into practical workflows, templates, structured guidance and automations.
• Build and improve legal workflows using Dust and other appropriate tools, including intake, contract review and approval processes.
• Test workflows, gather feedback, document how they work and iterate to improve their quality and adoption.
• Build appropriate controls into processes, including lawyer review points, escalation paths and safeguards for confidential information.

Get directly involved in commercial legal work

• Draft, review and prepare redlines for a wide range of commercial agreements, including NDAs, SaaS agreements, MSAs, order forms, DPAs, vendor contracts and partnership agreements.
• Support negotiation and deal execution with Sales, GTM and other teams, including participating in discussions when appropriate and under lawyer supervision.
• Help identify legal, privacy, data protection, security and AI-related issues in commercial matters, and bring them to the right lawyer for review.
• Conduct legal research, prepare issue summaries and help develop practical options for resolving contract questions.
• Progressively take on more responsibility as your experience and judgment develop, while escalating non-standard or higher-risk issues to qualified counsel.

Build the legal team's capabilities

• Help create and improve templates, playbooks, legal knowledge resources and tools that allow the wider company to handle routine work more consistently.
• Use and improve systems that make matter status, contract obligations and key deadlines visible, rather than relying on manual follow-up.
• Work with the General Counsel, Commercial Counsel and external counsel across a varied commercial workload.

Requirements

Every candidate and employee's success is measured against the same three dimensions: Aptitude, Attitude and Agency .

Aptitude

• Legal training, such as a law degree, paralegal qualification or equivalent experience.
• Some experience in a paralegal, legal assistant, commercial contracts or legal operations role is helpful. We're also open to strong early-career candidates.
• Clear legal writing, research and issue-spotting skills, with an interest in commercial law.
• Interest or experience in process design, automation, no-code or low-code tools, AI workflows or contract-management systems.
• Business-standard English is required. Business-standard French is a strong advantage, but not essential.
• Willingness to travel to the US or Paris from time to time when required.

Attitude

• Curious and motivated to develop as a commercial legal professional.
• Organised, careful and discreet when handling confidential information.
• A clear communicator who is comfortable asking questions, surfacing uncertainty and taking feedback.
• Collaborative and pragmatic, with a genuine interest in helping colleagues move work forward.

Agency

• Proactively identifies opportunities to improve how legal work is done, then helps design and build the solution.
• Takes ownership of process improvements from problem definition through implementation, testing and iteration.
• Gets directly involved in commercial legal matters and follows them through within the level of responsibility agreed with supervising lawyers.
• Uses judgment to move work forward while escalating decisions that require qualified legal review.