Legal & Compliance - sole hire, build with AI

Overview

This role is the organization’s sole legal and compliance hire. There is no internal legal team; you will own legal and compliance end-to-end for current business operations and for new products launched in the future.

The organization is building consumer financial tools for people historically excluded from the traditional credit system. This position will set the legal and compliance foundation as the organization shifts from a one-product company to a multi-product company.

Responsibilities

Stand up new products with the smallest footprint that works

• Partner with product and engineering on the design of each new product to achieve the customer outcome with the fewest licenses and obligations, reusing existing capabilities wherever possible.
• Define the entity, licensing, and bank-partner posture for each product once the design is settled.
• Draft and maintain the policies, procedures, disclosures, and agreements each product actually needs, and obtain partner and regulator approvals.
• Review marketing, product flows, and partnerships before launch, and build a scalable review process so approval does not require involvement in every thread.
• Reconcile compliance posture across the product suite as it grows, removing duplication rather than layering on additional obligations.

Own the existing posture and keep shrinking it

• Maintain current legal and compliance operations at a standard expected by partners.
• Identify opportunities to codify, automate, or retire workstreams and obligations.
• Run litigation defense, dispute resolution, complaints, exams, and audits with limited cross-functional support.
• Own bank and partner compliance relationships, privacy, and BSA/AML/KYC and fraud policy.

Run the function on agents

• Build and maintain agentic workflows for research, drafting, policy maintenance, monitoring, and reconciliation to reduce ongoing manual effort over time.
• Maintain a high quality bar for all work produced by workflows; judgment and critical thinking will remain non-delegable.
• Make recurring work redundant and measure success by the portion of the operating side that runs without you.
• Engage outside counsel only when something clearly requires it and cannot be handled through agentic workflows; scope tightly and own the relationship.

Communicate

• Provide founders and cross-functional partners (engineering, product, marketing, and customer experience) with clear, fast written guidance they can act on.
• Represent the organization with banks, partners, regulators, and auditors.

Requirements

• JD and active bar admission in a US state.
• Prior legal or compliance experience at a fintech startup, ideally a fast-growing one.
• Mid-career experience with enough regulated product exposure to have taken a regulated consumer product through its full lifecycle.
• Demonstrated multidisciplinary background (experience in a business, engineering, or product function before or alongside legal work is preferred).
• Hands-on experience with the consumer finance stack, including:
  • FCRA and credit reporting
  • UDAAP
  • TILA/Reg Z
  • ECOA
  • EFTA/Reg E
  • State lending and money-transmission licensing
  • Bank partnership programs
  • BSA/AML/KYC
• Experience managing outside counsel and regulator or bank-partner relationships directly.
• Strong technical proficiency, including comfort reading code and data, pulling your own numbers, and building workflows with AI tools.
• Exceptionally organized with a strong attention to detail.
• Clear and concise written communication.
• Willingness to operate in a high-intensity, high-ownership environment with fast timelines.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience shaped by designing for a minimal compliance footprint (e.g., avoiding a license through product design, consolidating programs, or automating processes).

Compensation & Benefits

• Compensation Range: $200K - $280K

Location

• Fully remote.
• Reporting line is to a founder based in Austin, TX.
• Austin, TX is a plus, not a requirement.