Deputy General Counsel - Global Head of Derivatives and Trading Legal

Payward - the parent company behind Kraken, Ninja Trader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks - has spent the last 15 years building one of the most modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platforms in the industry, built to advance an open, global financial system.

Before you apply, we encourage you to explore our culture page to understand what drives us and how we work.

Derivatives and Trading products sit in one of the most heavily regulated and fastest-moving parts of Payward's regulatory perimeter, and the estate is still expanding across a US venue and clearing stack, a UK venue, EEA distribution and a Bermuda entity. Today that work is owned in fragments. This is a net-new, function-owning role created to put global derivatives structuring strategy to a single senior owner.

This DGC will be responsible for the global suite of derivatives products as well as Payward’s trading products.

Products. Futures and options across the group, and margin in the US, and a set of trading products, including but not limited to leveraged and liquidity products, prediction markets, indices and market data, evaluation-based trading services and structured yield. The DGC will help define the delineation of these products between the new function and the existing Product Legal team.

Entities and regulators. A US venue and clearing stack (FCM/NFA, DCM, DCO), a UK FCA-authorised derivatives venue, EEA derivatives distribution under CySEC permissions, and a Bermuda DABA entity serving the rest of world and others. The general counsel of our acquired US futures brokerage (Ninja Trader) reports into this function.

Team. Senior derivatives and trading counsel across the US, UK and EEA, with the function set to grow, and the general counsel of the acquired US futures brokerage.

• Own global derivatives structuring strategy — product structure, venue and entity architecture, clearing models, and how a single coherent derivatives offering is delivered to clients across several separately licensed entities.

• Together with Payward’s Regulatory Legal team, solve the cross-entity problems that sit in no single product — hub-and-spoke architecture, unified balances, cross-margining, and where risk and client relationships actually sit across the group. These are the hardest questions we answer.

• Be the named senior legal owner for the derivatives and trading product lines
  , wired into the product launch process from the start rather than consulted at the end, and the single senior route into Legal for derivatives and trading.

• Lead and build the team — hire, level and develop senior derivatives counsel across jurisdictions, and build depth and succession into a function that is currently thin at the top.

• Partner with Global Policy and Government Relations as the senior legal counterpart for derivatives regulatory engagement with the CFTC, NFA, FCA, BMA, CySEC and others, pre-socialising positions with regulators and internal leadership before they land, not after.

• Support the supervised estates that carry derivatives permissions
  , working with Regulatory Legal on continuous supervisory relationships and on new permissions and variations tied to product launches.

• Bring structuring judgement in-house
  , and direct external counsel where genuinely specialist input is required.

• Additional duties and responsibilities as assigned

• Attorney admitted to practice in the US, or qualified lawyer (Solicitor/Barrister of England & Wales, Irish Solicitor/Barrister, or equivalent admitted in an EU Member State).

• 18+ years’ post-qualification experience (PQE) in financial services regulatory law gained at a regulated financial services…