Roles · Data & Research
Head of Data Trust
Latin America will spend this decade deciding whether it builds frontier AI capability or rents it. The region holds the energy, the minerals, the data, and the talent of 660 million people, and almost none of the compute, the models, or the governance leverage. Futuros exists to change that.
Futuros is the evidence platform for that argument: a live, cited, trilingual observatory of 25 countries built to put verifiable numbers in front of heads of state, CELAC, the IDB, CAF, ECLAC, and the private sector. The first pillar of the thesis is a regional data trust: data contributed under consent, licensed on the contributor's terms, revocable, and computed on without being possessed.
Platform in early access for partners and funders. We will walk you through it live during the process.
The role
The Head of Data Trust owns the legal and governance architecture that makes the data trust real: the instruments people sign, the rights they keep, and the institutions that hold it accountable. The role sits between law, policy, and engineering, and it starts from Latin American legal traditions, not a US or EU template renamed.
What you'll do
- Design the trust's legal architecture. Consent, licensing, revocation, and contribution ledgers that hold up across 25 jurisdictions with different data-protection regimes.
- Root it in the region's law. Habeas data traditions, Brazil's LGPD, and national frameworks are the starting material. What we build must be defensible in a Latin American constitutional court; a Delaware template will not survive one.
- Negotiate the agreements. Data-sharing terms with governments, statistics offices, private holders, and civil-society contributors.
- Define "compute without possession" precisely. Work with engineering on what the trust promises, what the architecture can prove, and where the two must never diverge.
- Build the governance. Trustee structures, member rights, audit mechanisms, and the escalation paths for when something goes wrong.
- Represent the model. Be the policy counterpart on regional data-governance frameworks with CELAC, multilaterals, and national regulators.
What we're looking for
- Data-governance depth. A law or policy background in data protection or digital rights, with real technical fluency; you can read an architecture diagram and find the legal hole in it.
- Deal experience. You have drafted and negotiated data-sharing or licensing agreements that got signed.
- Regional grounding. You know the LATAM regulatory landscape as it actually is, including where enforcement is theater.
- Professional working Spanish. The counterparts are regulators, ministries, and courts that operate in Spanish.
- Founding temperament. You are comfortable owning ambiguous problems with no one above you to escalate to.
Nice to have
- Portuguese.
- Familiarity with privacy-enhancing technologies: confidential compute, secure aggregation, differential privacy.
- Time inside a multilateral, regulator, or national data authority.
- Published work on data governance, digital rights, or data trusts.
How this works
This is a founding conversation. We are open on compensation, equity, and scope for the right fit, and we come to the table with strong institutional backing. We will be transparent about terms from the first call and expect the same directness back.
How to apply
Send a short note on your interest in the role, an example of what you've built that's aligned with the role, and why this is the dream role for you.
marcus@ladp.io