Job Description

About Cosun

Royal Cosun is an international agricultural cooperative with a clear purpose: unlocking the full potential of plants to create sustainable solutions in food, ingredients, animal feed and green energy. Founded in 1899 and owned by around 8,400 sugar beet growers, Cosun combines strong cooperative roots with an ambitious, forward-looking mindset.

Through its Unlock 30 strategy, Cosun is building a healthier, more sustainable and future-proof business, while responding to major societal transitions such as climate change, the protein transition and the growing demand for sustainable food and ingredients.

With more than 4,500 employees across Europe, Asia and North America, Cosun offers an international environment where innovation, sustainability and long-term value creation go hand in hand.

Within this context, the Cosun Legal team plays an important role in enabling sound decision-making, strengthening governance and compliance, and supporting the business with pragmatic, high-quality legal advice.

Are you ready to shape the legal function at the heart of Cosun? Join us as Senior Legal Counsel Corporate and strengthen our legal capabilities as a center of excellence, a legal operations function, and a trusted business partner to the Executive Board and corporate functions. In this role, you combine legal expertise with a strong focus on governance, standardization and strategic support across the organization. This position offers the unique opportunity to operate on a strategic level while actively building and further professionalizing the legal function as part of our Legal team.

What will you do

As a key member of the Legal team, you will help build and strengthen the legal function in support of Cosun’s strategy. Your role combines legal expertise, operational excellence, and senior stakeholder partnering, and will involve

• Act as a legal business partner to the Executive Board and corporate functions by providing advice on corporate, governance, compliance, and strategic matters relevant to the Cosun group.
• Help shape the legal function as a center of excellence by developing standards, templates and consistent ways of working, while proactively translating legal and regulatory changes into practical guidance and acting as group-level expert on overarching legal areas.
• Drive legal operations by improving processes, contract management, outside counsel management, knowledge sharing, and the overall efficiency and quality of legal support.
• Support key compliance processes and legal risk management.
• Work closely with the two legal business partners, Senior Counsel M&A, HQ stakeholders, and external counsel to ensure consistent, pragmatic, and high-quality legal support across Cosun.

The team and your role

You will join Cosun’s Legal team alongside two legal business partners supporting the business groups and Innovation, as well as a dedicated Senior M&A Counsel within Corporate Development focused on transactions, partnerships, and strategic growth initiatives. Reporting to the Director Corporate Development, this is a senior group-level role with broad exposure across the organization and a clear mandate to further strengthen Cosun’s legal function. The scope spans compliance and regulatory, commercial contracting, governance and legal frameworks, capability building, and legal systems and knowledge management. In this capacity, you will help shape group-wide legal strategy, define and embed compliance policies and standards, advise on corporate and business governance, oversee high-risk legal matters, and lead complex legal projects of strategic importance.

Qualifications

What will you bring

• At least 10–12 years’ experience as a lawyer in a leading law firm and/or in-house legal role, with broad exposure to corporate, governance, and strategic legal topics.
• Strong analytical skills and sound judgment, with the ability to balance legal risk, governance requirements, and business objectives.
• Experience or strong affinity with legal operations, standardization, process improvement, and building scalable ways of working.
• A proactive and credible stakeholder partner, able to work effectively with board members, senior leaders, and cross-functional teams in a complex HQ environment.
• Structured, hands-on, and pragmatic, with the ability to translate complexity into clear guidance and effective execution.
• A collaborative mindset and the confidence to operate independently in a dynamic HQ environment.
• Good command of Dutch and English, both spoken and written.

Additional Information

• An excellent gross monthly salary ranging from €8,000 to €9,600, depending on knowledge and level of experience;
• An annual bonus based on results;
• Comprehensive Benefits: enjoy a lease car, excellent pension scheme, generous holidays, and more.

Where will you work

Based in Breda with a lot of flexibility and opportunities for hybrid working, you will be part of Royal Cosun, a forward-thinking cooperative with 8,100 members and 4,500 employees worldwide. Our business groups include Cosun Beet Company, Aviko, Duynie, Sensus, and Cosun Protein. We unlock the potential of plants into enjoyable, plant-based and circular products.