Join Airbus UpNext in Toulouse as a Legal and Contract Manager on a 1-year fixed-term contract (CDD) starting March 1, 2027. You will coordinate contract and legal actions, manage end-to-end workflows, and support innovative partnerships. Mandatory English fluency and a legal background are required for this professional role.
Requirements
Legal background required; business degree preferred.
At least 5 years of experience in contracting within an innovation and international context.
Experience in procurement contracting (IP protection, contract terms, negotiations) is ideal.
High-level drafting and negotiation skills in English are mandatory; basic French, Spanish, or German is a plus.
Skills & Responsibilities
Contract management: Manage the end-to-end contracting workflow from recognizing needs to signed documents, ensuring frictionless contracting for demonstrators.
Negotiation and risk analysis: Support negotiations of business terms, intellectual property rights, and supplier selection while analyzing and mitigating business risks.
Process optimization: Coordinate closely with Procurement, Legal, and other central functions to optimize interfaces, harmonize best practices, and improve contracting templates.
Compliance: Respect Ethics & Compliance and Export Control rules, adapting them to the Airbus UpNext startup spirit.
Potential transition routes: People from commercial legal or contract management roles may bring strong negotiation and risk assessment skills, alongside meeting the required legal background and international contracting experience.
Job description
Job Description:
Airbus UpNext is able to operate as an agile organization by relying heavily on customized contracting workflows and ecosystem partners engaged via contracts. That places our Legal and Contract Managers right in the thick of the action every day.
As a Legal and Contract Manager, you are eager to try new things, challenge standard approaches, and basically get it done.
You will report to the Head of Legal, Contracts and Compliance and coordinate all UpNext contract and legal actions.
This position is based in Toulouse (Saint Martin) and it consists of a limited contract (CDD) of 1 year (withpossibility of prolongation), starting 1st of March 2027.
Your main missions
Being responsible for the end-to-end workflow for contracts, starting with recognizing a need and ending with a signed document.
Working closely with other central & divisional functions such as funding, insurance, export control, intellectual property, etc. as well as Airbus Procurement to optimize and harmonize interfaces
Ultimate goal - “frictionless contracting” to enable our open innovation and partnerships model
Responsibilities:
Closely working with Heads of Demonstrators and other contracting internal customers to forecast their needs for contracted partner relationships, from a standard contract type to a more disruptive approach when required
Helping the Heads of Demonstrators to develop formal requests for proposal, manage the process of collecting and reviewing proposals, and assist with selecting vendors / suppliers by analysing the contract’s risk to the business
Supporting negotiation of business terms including Intellectual property rights with partnering organizations/suppliers or financial terms and produce contract documentation for signature
Initiating and implementing continuous Airbus UpNext contracting improvement actions: template improvement, Contracting network support, Partnership & Contracting, good practices evangelisation, etc.
Coordinating closely with Procurement, Legal and other related functions in the Corporate Technology Office and big Airbus to optimize process interfaces and harmonize best practices and to anticipate any alignment issues
Respecting the Ethics & Compliance rules including Export Control rules, adapting those rules to Airbus UpNext spirit.
Your boarding pass
What you bring
Legal background mandatory (with business degree preferred)
At least 5 years experience in contracting with proven success stories in innovation and international context
Sharing the values of transparency, courage, humility, empathy
High level drafting and negotiation skills in English are mandatory/ basic French or Spanish or German language skills are a plus
What you get
An environment that not only fosters your development in many ways, but also rewards it with plenty of room to grow
A shared open space office with highly skilled and fun multicultural teams
UpNext communities bonding events
About us
Founded in 2017, Airbus UpNext is actively shaping the future of aerospace by using demonstrators to evaluate, mature and validate new products and services. Our purpose is to pioneer game-changing technologies with Airbus.
In this role, you will embody the core Airbus UpNext values:
Care for Each Other : Ensuring a supportive and inclusive environment.
Be Simple : Finding the most efficient path to success.
Be Audacious : Challenging the status quo to make the unthinkable real.
Be Open: Collaborative solution-finding across diverse teams.
Speed of Execution : Moving at the speed of a startup.
Feel the fire in your belly when you read this? If so.... Send us your application!
This job requires an awareness of any potential compliance risks and a commitment to act with integrity, as the foundation for the Company’s success, reputation and sustainable growth.
By submitting your CV or application you are consenting to Airbus using and storing information about you for monitoring purposes relating to your application or future employment. This information will only be used by Airbus. Airbus is committed to achieving workforce diversity and creating an inclusive working environment. We welcome all applications irrespective of social and cultural background, age, gender, disability, sexual orientation or religious belief.
Airbus is, and always has been, committed to equal opportunities for all. As such, we will never ask for any type of monetary exchange in the frame of a recruitment process. Any impersonation of Airbus to do so should be reported to emsom@airbus.com .
At Airbus, we support you to work, connect and collaborate more easily and flexibly. Wherever possible, we foster flexible working arrangements to stimulate innovative thinking.
