Associate General Counsel, Privacy

Shopify's Regulatory and Privacy Legal team is the front line for every regulatory, privacy, and data protection issue that touches the platform. We advise product and engineering teams on how to build things that work for merchants and comply with the law — often in jurisdictions where the law is still being written. We handle regulator inquiries, manage privacy incidents, negotiate with partners on data practices, and build the internal frameworks that make all of it scale. The team sits within Legal and works closely with, well, just about every other team in the company.

You're a privacy lawyer who actually likes the hard parts — the ambiguous product question where GDPR and CCPA point in different directions, the data flow that doesn't map cleanly onto any regulatory framework, the partner negotiation where the data rights in the DPA are hotly contested. You're not looking for a role where you rubber-stamp DPIAs and maintain a privacy policy. You're looking for a role where you shape how a platform used by millions of merchants handles data at scale, and where the regulatory landscape changes faster than you can update your tracker.

You should be a generalist with depth. You need to be able to triage a broad range of global privacy issues — cookies in the UK, ads consent in the EU, CCPA enforcement in California, data localization in India — and go deep when it matters. You should be comfortable advising product teams who are building things with tools that didn't exist three months ago, in regulatory environments that didn't exist six months ago. Agentic commerce, AI-generated content, cross-border data flows for merchant services — these are the problems you'll work on.

You use AI tools reflexively. Not as a novelty — as a baseline for how you work. If you're not already using AI to draft, research, and build, this probably isn't the right fit.

Seeking high-performing team players. This role reports to the Director, Privacy Legal.

Provide privacy counsel on complex product launches, new features, and strategic partnerships — particularly where Shopify is handling merchant and buyer data in new ways.