Privacy Legal Counsel

Booking Holdings Romania is a Center of Excellence based in Bucharest, Romania and was created to support the increasing business demands of the Booking Holdings Brands. The Center of Excellence provides access to specialized and highly skilled talent, leading industry best practices, and collaboration opportunities across all of our Brands.

As part of our Booking Holdings Romania team, you will have the opportunity to be a part of the world’s leading provider of online travel, with a mission of making it easier for everyone to experience the world through five-primary consumer facing brands: Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, KAYAK and OpenTable.

This role provides a hybrid way of working with an onsite presence of 2 days/week.

Role description

Booking.com’s growing Legal team is looking forward to welcoming a dynamic and innovative privacy legal counsel, who has a keen eye for detail whilst keeping the bigger business context in mind. We are looking for someone who is excellent at drafting; is able to collaborate successfully  with a range of stakeholders across the business; and who is excited at the opportunity to build a career in a fast paced travel and tech environment, where you can truly make a difference.

As Legal Counsel  - Privacy (Procurement), you will be responsible for supporting the Procurement teams at Booking.com in close collaboration with other legal counsels in both the Privacy and Procurement Legal teams.  You will be the Privacy Legal subject matter expert, reviewing and giving input to contracts involving high risk, high complexity data sharing.  Your goal will be to create value for the business as a whole, by ensuring that the company's privacy risks are minimized, while enabling important business objectives and initiatives. You will draw upon your legal and privacy knowledge, business acumen and excellent drafting and negotiating skills to provide on-the-ground support, coordinating across multiple priorities and business stakeholders, and identifying potential privacy issues and solutions, particularly in respect of agreements with key strategic vendors.

This is an exciting opportunity to help develop strategic relationships that support key business-wide initiatives. You will have the opportunity to work across multiple teams and departments within the business, learning and sharing knowledge and developing your own skills and experience whilst supporting a fast moving process. Apart from contract negotiations, you will be able to take the lead on developing templates and playbooks to support Procurement and Procurement Legal; you will be able to advise on and contribute to the creation of training for teams across the business; you will have the opportunity to lead on creating self-service tools and to train colleagues in how to use them, playing a key role in helping to improve and update processes.  

You will:

• have direct experience of negotiating and drafting contracts with minimal supervision;
• be a self-starter, with strong attention to detail and motivated to deliver great results whilst working collaboratively and pooling knowledge with other teams;
• be great at prioritizing and managing a diverse range of procurement contracts with a focus on technology and privacy requirements (working to the business standards and negotiation parameters);
• coordinate the ownership of incoming contract reviews across a variety of teams and stakeholders (for example, undertaking your initial privacy legal review of a data sharing agreement and then coordinating with procurement, procurement legal, business stakeholders and vendors, as needed, to agree and finalise the wording of the agreement);
• serve as an escalation point and provide advice on privacy contract questions needed to unlock challenges and progress high profile and strategic commercial agreements; 
• draft, review and negotiate data processing agreements (DPAs) using your knowledge of, among others: the obligations of data controllers, data processors and subprocessors, international data transfer mechanisms, data storage and transfers, liability for data breaches, cloud service and service agreements, SAAS agreements, on prem solutions;
• maintain and update our DPA templates and playbooks and create and provide related training to non-legal colleagues.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties 

• Have demonstrable experience and skills in contract negotiation and contract management. Some privacy experience is preferable although not mandatory. You will have a curious mindset and be willing to learn about privacy to become the subject matter expert in data privacy and data protection for contracts.
• Take charge of priority contracts that need privacy legal review and input.
• Be the subject matter expert for data privacy and data protection contract negotiations, representing the Privacy Legal team and working directly with the Procurement team, Procurement Legal team and  business stakeholders as the first point of contact for privacy legal questions. 
• Draft and negotiate clear and commercially appropriate procurement agreements with new vendors and negotiate renewals with existing vendors, in respect of the business privacy requirements within agreed parameters and guidelines.
• Have a well structured, clear and organized way of working particularly when managing the contract review process, with an ability to prioritize tasks, manage your own time and drive progress within a very fast paced environment.
• Demonstrate a collaborative approach to getting the job done, drawing on technical and specialist support from other members of the Privacy Legal team and the Legal & Public Affairs function (where required), translating that input into your contract reviews and sharing your advice, communicating clearly with a range of stakeholders both within the business and externally with vendors.
• Create guidance documents and training materials for other teams and colleagues under the direction of the Senior Managing Counsel.
• Stretch out to support other initiatives within the Privacy legal team, as capacity allows and in accordance with your interests and business needs

Role Qualifications and Requirements

• EU law degree (NL, UK or US training is an advantage)
• At least 3 years’ experience in a reputable law firm and/or in-house legal team 
• Experience in reviewing, drafting and negotiating contracts (preferably with a focus on technology or privacy matters): 2+ years
• Experience in data protection or data privacy contract reviews: 2+ years 
• Native or fluent English speaking and writing skills
• Excellent communication skills (written and oral)
• Excellent drafting skills and attention to detail
• Excellent organizational skills and ability to meet deadlines, prioritizing appropriately
• Professional and collaborative approach
• Strong knowledge of or familiarity with using Microsoft Office applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) and Google Suite (Google Sheets, Google Docs)

Benefits & Perks

• Contributing to a high scale, complex, world renowned product and seeing real-time impact of your work on millions of travelers worldwide
• Working in a fast-paced and performance driven culture
• Technical, behavioral and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation
• Competitive compensation and benefits package 
• Vast amounts of data to validate your ideas and the opportunity to experiment with real users

Booking Holdings is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. We strive to move well beyond traditional equal opportunity and work to create an environment that allows everyone to thrive.

If your application is successful, your personal data may be used for a pre-employment screening check by a third party as permitted by applicable law. Depending on the vacancy and applicable law, a pre-employment screening may include employment history, education and other information (such as media information) that may be necessary for determining your qualifications and suitability for the position.