A Decade of In-House Legal Growth & Leadership with Katalin Kiss

What does it take to navigate the complex legal landscape of a global tech company? For Katalin Kiss, Director, Head of Group Corporate Law at Delivery Hero, the answer lies in continuous learning, process design, and the courage to step into high-stakes opportunities.

Having recently celebrated her 10-year anniversary at Delivery Hero, Katalin’s career journey illustrates how internal mobility, continuous learning and progressively broader responsibility can create a path into legal leadership. In this spotlight, she reflects on her decade at Delivery Hero - from supporting the company’s IPO as a relatively junior team member in 2017 to serving as a legal co-lead for the talabat IPO in 2024 - as well as her team’s approach to technology and what she looks for when hiring legal talent.

From startup to global leader

Katalin’s Delivery Hero story began ten years ago, when she moved from Budapest to Berlin and joined the company in 2016 while completing her Hungarian legal studies. She subsequently earned an LL.M. in International Financial and Commercial Law from King’s College London. Joining Delivery Hero as a Legal Assistant, she became part of a fast-growing international company still operating with much of the energy and agility of a startup.

“Over the past decade, I’ve experienced several defining stages of the group’s development,” Katalin reflects. “I was here when we were operating from a much smaller office, through hypergrowth, our development into a mature publicly listed company, and our continued evolution as a global organization.”

Her progression into a Director role was not a single promotion, but a series of deliberate moves across diverse practice areas. Katalin expanded her expertise across Corporate M&A, Capital Markets, Equity/Share-based Compensation Plans, and Group Corporate Law. Along the way, she developed through both specialist and managerial tracks. Her leadership responsibilities grew from managing one or two colleagues to leading her current team and, during interim assignments, temporarily taking responsibility for teams of more than ten colleagues.

This broad experience gave her an end-to-end understanding of Delivery Hero’s legal and corporate environment, preparing her to take on increasingly complex international transactions and leadership responsibilities.

Governance at global scale

Today, as Head of Group Corporate Law, Katalin leads the Berlin-based team responsible for the corporate governance framework supporting more than 270 legal entities across close to 70 countries. The team works closely with senior management and colleagues across Finance, Tax, Treasury, M&A, Capital Markets and regional operations, providing corporate-law and governance input on significant transactions and business decisions. Complex group restructurings form a central part of its work, alongside recurring corporate obligations, capital flows, market entries and exits, and support for M&A and other high-impact business projects.

Operating at this scale requires more than technical legal expertise. It requires clear governance, reliable information, and processes that can be applied consistently while remaining adaptable to local requirements.

To manage this complexity effectively, the team combines process optimization with thoughtful use of technology:

• Responsible use of AI: Years of investment in documented workflows, policies, and templates have created a strong foundation for exploring AI-supported legal work. The team assesses use cases according to their complexity and risk profile, applying appropriate legal review, human judgment and accountability while using technology to reduce administrative effort and support more sophisticated legal work.
• Integrated entity management: Managing more than 270 legal entities requires accurate information to be available across functions and jurisdictions. The team is moving corporate data from separate systems into an integrated global entity-management platform, creating a more reliable source of information for Legal, Finance, Tax and Treasury teams. Better access to ownership information, organizational structures and corporate documentation enables faster decision-making, supports transactions and reduces the administrative effort required across the group.
• Continuous improvement: As the group matures and the surrounding legal, regulatory and technological environment changes, the team continually reviews its governance structures and processes to ensure they remain fit for purpose. Even after a solution has been implemented, the team looks for ways to simplify it, strengthen it and make it work better for the people who use it.

Co-leading the talabat IPO

One of the defining projects of Katalin’s career was serving as one of the legal co-leads for the 2024 talabat IPO. The transaction raised approximately USD 2 billion and gave talabat an implied market capitalization of approximately USD 10.1 billion, making it the largest global technology IPO of 2024.

The project involved an extensive group restructuring alongside the preparation and execution of the offering. Despite an initial timeline that contemplated more than a year of preparation, the cross-functional team completed the transaction in less than five months.

Navigating the sprint

Executing a transaction of this scale within a compressed timeline required disciplined coordination across functions, jurisdictions and time zones:

• Cross-functional scale: The project brought together 30–40 legal professionals and more than 100 internal stakeholders across Berlin, Dubai and several regional entities, all operating under strict confidentiality requirements.
• Cross-cultural collaboration: Katalin worked closely with teams across different functions and jurisdictions, navigating the interaction between transaction requirements, regulatory obligations and carefully coordinated communications.
• Lasting methodologies: To manage the speed and complexity of execution, the team developed dedicated document trackers, version-control processes and governance frameworks. Several of these working methods have since been adapted for other major restructuring projects across Delivery Hero.

Growing into leadership

Katalin’s progression into leadership was gradual, something she now sees as one of its strengths. Having worked at different levels of the legal function - from operational and specialist roles to managing legal teams - has shaped how she supports the development of others.

“I did not become a leader through one promotion. My responsibilities grew step by step, and each stage taught me something different about how a legal function operates and what people need from their manager.”

She also believes that supporting more women in progressing into leadership roles requires both individual initiative and meaningful organizational support.

“Women do not simply need to be told to be more confident. They need visible opportunities, honest feedback and leaders who are prepared to trust them with real responsibility. At the same time, I have learned that you cannot always wait until you feel completely ready. Some of the most important opportunities require you to step forward while you are still growing into them.”

What does it take to thrive in Delivery Hero’s legal team?

For lawyers transitioning from private practice, joining a fast-moving technology company can represent a significant shift in perspective. When asked what makes a candidate stand out, Katalin points to three qualities:

1. Business-focused communication: “Private practice develops strong analytical discipline and the ability to identify legal risks comprehensively. In-house, you must translate that analysis into concise, commercially grounded advice. You need to understand what the business is trying to achieve and identify a legally sound path to get there.”
2. Process and design thinking: “With hundreds of subsidiaries, we cannot solve every problem on an ad hoc basis. We look for colleagues who naturally think in processes and ask: Can we turn this into a reusable template, an automated workflow or a standardized policy for the future?”
3. Agility and ownership: “We give team members meaningful autonomy early in their development. Whether you are a junior colleague learning how entity governance works or a senior lawyer leading an M&A workstream, you need to take ownership and remain comfortable adapting as the business evolves.”

Ready to write your own growth story?

At Delivery Hero, Legal operates as a strategic partner across global governance, complex restructurings and capital transactions. Katalin’s journey from Legal Assistant to Director demonstrates what long-term development can look like when curiosity and strong performance are matched with internal mobility, meaningful opportunities and progressively greater responsibility.

If you're ready to help us move fast and navigate what's next, take the next step. Explore roles on the Legal Team