Legal Counsel

About the Role

This is a broad, hands-on legal counsel role for a regulated, multi-jurisdictional fintech. You'll be the dedicated legal advisor across commercial contracts and regulatory questions touching Payhawk's payment services business (EMI licensing, PSD2, UK PSRs, GDPR, CCPA), with day-to-day exposure across the full spread of legal issues a scaling finance platform faces.

You'll advise executive members on how new and existing law affects the business, act as a trusted legal representative internally and externally, and handle the vast majority of this work yourself rather than defaulting to external counsel, using outside lawyers selectively for specialist or high-stakes matters.

Key Responsibilities

Legal operations and process

• Maintain and improve the legal processes, systems, and governance the business needs as it scales: contract lifecycle management, approval workflows, document storage, and reporting.
• Identify and apply AI tools to streamline contract review, drafting, and other legal workflows, building on the team's existing AI assisted intake process.

Client contracts and commercial agreements

• Own the drafting, negotiation, and execution of client and partner contracts, including terms specific to financial institution and regulated customers.
• Act as a primary legal point of contact for commercial negotiations, including contract disputes and cancellation or breach questions as they arise.
• Maintain and improve a suite of template agreements, playbooks, and fallback positions to speed up contracting.

Vendor and third-party contracts

• Review and negotiate vendor, supplier, and partner agreements, including data processing terms for new vendors (including AI vendors), balancing commercial pace against risk.
• Apply a consistent approach to vendor contracting, including standard terms and an approval process the wider business can self serve against.

Employment and other advisory

• Provide input on employment contracts, policies, and people related matters, working alongside HR and external specialists where needed.
• Act as a general legal advisor to the business, fielding day to day queries across the company and triaging what needs specialist input.

Requirements

• Qualified lawyer (or equivalent legal qualification) with 5 years or more post-qualification experience (PQE).
• Significant in-house counsel experience in a tech business, ideally at a regulated fintech or financial services company.
• Hands on experience using AI tools to improve legal efficiency, and genuine enthusiasm for continuing to do so.
• A genuine generalist track record spanning commercial and client contracts, vendor contracts, data protection, and disputes, with comfort giving input on employment matters.
• Experience working across multiple jurisdictions, EU and UK exposure required, US exposure a strong plus.
• Comfort operating within a lean in house legal function, taking on wide ranging exposure and escalating to external counsel only where genuinely needed.
• Sound commercial judgment and the ability to communicate legal risk clearly to a non legal audience.
• Excellent communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills. Arbitration and mediation experience is a plus.

Regulatory advisory (ideal, but not required)

• Advise on payment services and EMI regulatory questions across the jurisdictions Payhawk operates in.
• Support responses to regulatory and third party requests (subpoenas, disclosure requests, and similar), coordinating with external counsel where needed.

• Working knowledge of payment services regulation (EU PSD2, UK PSRs) and GDPR/CCPA, or a demonstrated ability to get up to speed quickly in a regulated environment.

Company Benefits

• 30 days holiday paid leave
• Opportunity to use the Payhawk product with a monthly commuting allowance
• Health and Fitness membership
• Private healthcare
• An L&D budget to support continuous development
• Exchange policy to another Payhawk office (Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, London)
• Regular team wide company events

Please note that unfortunately we cannot provide visa sponsorship, and to be considered for this role, candidates must be able to provide proof of their eligibility to work in the EU.

Payhawk is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.