Legal Associate

About The Company
Hercle is a fast-growing fintech building institutional-grade infrastructure that bridges fiat, stablecoins, and digital assets, enabling cross-border payments and banking infrastructure for global trade. Serving over 200 clients globally, Hercle provides banks, brokers, payment service providers, fintechs, commodity traders, corporate treasuries, and other NBFIs with seamless solutions for cross-border payments and treasury management.

About The Role
We are looking for a Legal Associate with a hands-on mindset, sharp drafting skills and the appetite to take ownership. You will contribute to Hercle’s legal and regulatory work from your first week. Legal at Hercle is a lean and cross-domain team, which means you will gain exposure across every part of the legal work of a regulated scale-up. That includes institutional and commercial contracts, regulatory matters under MiCAR and payments regulation, governance, and the group’s international expansion. Your main focus will be the Italian entity, but you will also support the other companies of Hercle’s group. You will take ownership of live matters from day one, with the scope of your workstreams growing as your confidence and skills develop. How We Work Hercle is a mission-driven team built by people who come from Tier 1 banks, consultancy firms and fintechs. We hold ourselves to a very high standard of professionalism: precision, responsiveness and ownership are non-negotiable. We value people who are organised, who follow through indipendently, and who want to grow fast in an environment where excellence is the baseline.

Key Responsibilities
Day-to-day
• Drafting, reviewing and negotiating commercial agreements: BaaS and partnership agreements, NDAs, vendor and outsourcing contracts, OTC contracts.
• Supporting regulatory correspondence and requests from supervisory authorities.
• Reviewing marketing communications, product documentation and customer terms against MiCAR and payments regulation.
• Answering legal inquiries from the business, onboarding, compliance, sales and product teams.
• Updating internal policies, procedures and legal registers. Long-term
• Owning legal workstreams from end to end, such as a product launch, a new partnership or a regulatory filing.
• Contributing to the regulatory structuring of new products, from digital-asset services and e-money to payments and lending.
• Supporting the group’s international expansion and global licensing efforts.
• Building and improving the legal team’s templates, playbooks and internal tools, including AI-assisted workflows.
• Contributing to corporate and governance matters, including fundraising and investor documentation.
• Growing into a reference point for specific regulatory areas, such as MiCAR, DORA or AML. Requirements
• A degree in Law.
• 2–3 years of experience in a top-tier law firm or a large, structured company.
• Strong drafting and negotiation skills.
• Fluent Italian and English.
• The ability to work autonomously, manage several priorities at once and meet deadlines. Nice to have
• Experience in fintech, banking, payments or digital assets.
• Familiarity with MiCAR, PSD2/EMD, TUB/TUF, DORA or AML regulation (D.
Lgs. 231/2007).
• Experience with AI tools and process automation. Why join Hercle?
• A hybrid role based in our Milan office.
• Direct exposure to regulators, institutional counterparties and the group’s international projects.
• A small, high-performing team where your work has an immediate impact.
• Ownership of entire workstreams from day one.
• The opportunity to develop your AI proficiency. By submitting this application, I confirm that all the information given by me in this application for employment and any additional documents attached hereto are true to the best of my knowledge and that I have not wilfully suppressed any material fact. I confirm I have disclosed if applicable any previous employment with Hercle. I accept that if any of the information given by me in this application is in any way false or incorrect, my application may be rejected, any offer of employment may be withdrawn or my employment with Hercle may be terminated summarily or I may be dismissed. By submitting this application, I agree that my personal data will be processed in accordance with Hercle's Candidate Privacy Notice