Director, Product Legal (EmFi & Payments)

ABOUT AIRWALLEX

Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 676,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own.

We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,300 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles https://www.airwallex.com/en-us/operating-principles to see it in full.

About the team

Legal & Licensing at Airwallex sits at the heart of the decisions that shape how Airwallex grows. This team backs the visionary builders transforming Airwallex into a generational financial company, sharing the journey of product development and sales alongside our business partners. You’ll help shape a global licensing footprint most fintechs wish they had, while making sure our brand and data architecture stay best-in-class for customers entering the agentic economy and ready for its regulatory demands. The hard part is helping the business move fast on product, revenue, and new-market expansion without compromising the regulatory discipline that protects the moat.

It’s a team for lawyers, strategists, and licensing specialists with commercial instincts, sharp judgment, and an obsession with customer-first outcomes. If you want to guide executive decisions and help build the licensing, structure, and judgment behind what comes next, this is where legal has real leverage.

What you'll do

You will serve as lead for a product-counsel team that covers Embedded Finance, Payments for Platforms, Issuing, and Lending. These are some of the company's highest-growth and most complex product lines.

You'll partner directly with Product, Enterprise Sales, Financial Partnerships, Risk, Regulatory Compliance, and Engineering to structure novel deal models, advise on multi-jurisdictional financial regulation, and ensure that Airwallex's EmFi products can scale globally with legal certainty. The work spans the full product lifecycle: from early-stage ideation and regulatory structuring through terms drafting, bank-partner coordination, and go-to-market readiness. You'll operate at the intersection of payments law, platform economics, and commercial strategy, supporting marquee enterprise customers and helping Airwallex build its global regulatory moat.

This role is based in New York or San Francisco, US.

Responsibilities:

- Support global enterprise AEs through structuring and driving forward Airwallex's most complex EmFi deals, and advise Product and other cross-functional teams on questions about various EmFi models.

- Provide practical, risk-weighted regulatory guidance on U.S. and international payments and financial services laws, including money transmission, AML/BSA, consumer protection (Reg E, UDAAP), card network rules, state licensing, and bank-partner/BaaS requirements, translating regulatory complexity into actionable product advice.

- Draft, review, and negotiate financial partnership agreements and platform terms and conditions, including contracts with banks, PSPs, and card networks, and manage publication of terms updates for EmFi product changes.

- Develop and maintain scalable legal playbooks, reference documents, and approved use-case repositories that enable Product, Commercial Legal, and Sales teams to move faster with less friction on standard deal patterns.

- Collaborate closely with Regulatory Legal, Data & Privacy, Risk, FCC, and Commercial Legal to ensure cross-functional alignment on product launches, GRC escalations, and regulatory exam responses.

- Contribute to Product Legal Readiness for new market and product launches across the global GTM roadmap, coordinating with Global Expansion & Licensing and regional product legal leads to deliver multi-jurisdictional regulatory assessments on time.

Who you are

We're looking for people who meet the minimum requirements for this role. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but are not mandatory.

Minimum qualifications:

- JD (or equivalent law degree) and active bar membership in at least one U.S. jurisdiction.

- 10+ years of experience in payments, complex deal structuring, and financial regulation, with a proven ability to make decisions on the fly in the face of ambiguous regulation and novel fact patterns.

- Deep working knowledge of U.S. payments and financial services regulatory frameworks, including money transmission laws, AML/BSA, Reg E, UDAAP, card network rules, and bank-partner/BaaS program requirements.

- Demonstrated experience serving as an embedded legal partner to product and engineering teams, providing proactive counsel from ideation through launch in a fast-paced fintech or financial services environment.

- Strong drafting and negotiation skills, with experience structuring and negotiating agreements with banks, payment processors, card networks, or other financial partners.

- Excellent cross-functional communication skills, with the ability to discuss complex technical and regulatory matters clearly with all levels of seniority, including C-suite stakeholders.

Preferred qualifications:

- Prior experience at a top-tier law firm combined with in-house experience at a fintech, payments company, or technology company offering regulated financial products.

- Experience with multi-jurisdictional product launches, including familiarity with European payments regulation (PSD2, e-money frameworks) or other non-U.S. financial services regimes.

- Track record of building legal playbooks, scalable frameworks, or internal knowledge resources that reduce friction and accelerate product development cycles.

- Comfort operating in environments with high standards, fast iteration cycles, and evolving priorities, with an entrepreneurial mindset and a bias toward action and continuous improvement.

APPLICANT SAFETY POLICY: FRAUD AND THIRD-PARTY RECRUITERS

To protect you from recruitment scams, please be aware that Airwallex will not ask for bank details, sensitive ID numbers (i.e. passport), or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com http://airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com http://careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page.

Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Airwallex will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s). Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes to Airwallex on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don’t regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.