Director, Product Legal; EmFi & Payments

Position: 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 Tik Tok, 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 ouroperating 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 doYou 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 areWe're looking for people who meet the minimum requirements for this role. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but are not mandatory.

Minimum…