Supply chain payments company Tradeshift has cashed in on its first chief legal officer.

San Francisco-based Tradeshift announced Wednesday that Silicon Valley in-house veteran Amer Moorhead has joined as senior vice president, chief legal officer, chief compliance officer and general counsel.

His new role combines legal and business operations strategies. Moorhead will report to Tradeshift co-founder and CEO Christian Lanng as he builds a global legal team for the company. Currently, Tradeshift has one other lawyer working in its legal department.

Aside from growing the legal team, Moorhead told Corporate Counsel he will help prepare the company for an IPO in the coming years.

“What I find so appealing in this fintech and spend management space is collaboration,” Moorhead said in a statement. “Tradeshift is in the middle of buyers and sellers providing an essential collaboration platform. This creates fascinating opportunities for our customers to leverage data flow, data ownership, AI, and data insights. It's a big reason I wanted to come to Tradeshift.”

This isn't Moorhead's first time at a data-driven tech company. He joins Tradeshift after more than three years at data-platform vendor Couchbase, where he was vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary. In that role, Moorhead oversaw all the company's legal needs, focusing on corporate, board and financing activities.

He also worked on scaling and globalizing Couchbase's selling and contracting processes, an experience that will help him at Tradeshift.

“As we scale significantly, Amer brings deep experience in globalizing corporate operations,” Lanng said in a statement. “What Amer brings is the right mindset and the skills to help us navigate to our next stage of development. He'll be our legal advisor across every aspect of the company.”

Before Couchbase, Moorhead spent more than two years as senior vice president and chief legal counsel of software corporation SAP SE. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was lead product counsel, head of field legal for EMEA, Asia Pacific, and Latin America and involved in M&A.

He spent the bulk of his in-house career at Palo Alto, California-based SAP Ariba, where he was senior vice president and deputy general counsel. Moorhead told Corporate Counsel that Ariba was his first experience working at a fintech company. It was also the first role that required him to build a global legal team, which he'll have to do at Tradeshift.

“I'm building the team practically from scratch,” Moorhead told Corporate Counsel. “I did the same thing at Ariba.”

He said he'll bring lessons from Ariba into his new role, especially for international work. At Ariba, he initially focused on U.S. lawyers who often misunderstood local norms. He said that as Tradeshift's team scales to a global market, he'll look for lawyers who are culturally competent.

Ariba was Moorhead's second in-house gig, preceded by Hitachi Data Systems. He started his legal career at Sedgwick, a defunct San Francisco-based law firm. Moorhead holds both a law degree and a master's degree in business administration from the University of San Francisco.