Counsel, Product Legal, Financial Partnerships

ABOUT AIRWALLEX Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 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 2,700 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 The Legal and Licensing team at Airwallex is a collaborative group of legal minds and licensing experts. We provide expert guidance and support to all areas of the business, proactively identifying, mitigating, and managing legal and financial risks. What you’ll do As Counsel, Product Legal, Financial Partnerships, you will play a key role in the legal strategy and execution for Airwallex’s global network of banking and strategic partners, with a primary base in Singapore. You will partner closely with our Financial Partnerships, Product and Risk teams to structure, negotiate and scale complex deals that underpin our issuing, payments, embedded finance, and yield products. You will also work on partnerships that will enable new market launches and enhance customer acquisition.. In addition to working on complex deals, you will design processes and playbooks that enable fast, repeatable contracting, and help embed AI into our workflows to increase quality and velocity. This dynamic role is ideal for a product / partnerships lawyer who is comfortable operating at pace in a high‑growth fintech, balancing commercial outcomes with rigorous risk management, and thrives on taking action and delivering results. This role can be based in Singapore or Malaysia. Responsibilities: - Lead and execute complex negotiations with banking partners, payment schemes and other financial institutions, using centralized playbooks, escalation matrices and AI‑enabled workflows to manage legal and commercial risk. - Establish and maintain high standards for documentation hygiene, including centralized deal trackers, legal risk registers and contract repositories integrated with AI tooling, so the business can self‑serve and re‑use prior work effectively. - Design, implement and continuously improve processes, templates and playbooks for contracting with financial partners, including intake, risk review, escalation, execution, storage and implementation handoffs to product domain owners and user terms owners. - Champion the use of AI tools in Product Legal, including AI‑assisted contract review, legal risk reviews and PRD analysis, to drive scalable, repeatable workflows and measurable improvements in speed and quality. - Partner with Product, Financial Partnerships, Regulatory Legal, Risk and Commercial teams on new product launches, new regions and complex deal structures, ensuring alignment with Airwallex’s licensing, risk appetite and AI‑native strategy. - Act as a trusted advisor to executives and deal owners on risk‑weighted options, escalation decisions and trade‑offs in high‑value or strategically significant partnerships. 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: - 5-10 years of post‑qualification experience as a lawyer, including significant time at a top‑tier law firm and/or in‑house in fintech, payments, banking or adjacent financial services. - Experience drafting and negotiating complex commercial and regulatory‑sensitive agreements , ideally across multiple regions. - Demonstrated ability to build and improve legal processes, playbooks and templates that enable efficient, repeatable contracting at scale, while maintaining strong controls and clear escalation paths. - Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence senior commercial, product and risk leaders in a fast‑moving, high‑growth environment. - Qualified to practice law in a common law jurisdiction (for example, Singapore, England & Wales, US, Australia) or equivalent, with strong academic credentials. Preferred qualifications: - Familiarity with payments, issuing, embedded finance or related products, and the regulatory frameworks that apply to cross‑border financial services. - Prior experience in a legal role at a high‑growth technology company, payments company or bank. - Experience implementing or working with AI‑enabled legal tools (e.g. Harvey, Claude etc.) to enhance contract review processes and knowledge management, and comfort driving AI adoption in a legal team. - Experience supporting partnerships that enable issuing, card programs, embedded finance, stablecoin or digital asset rails, or other next‑generation financial infrastructure. - Ability to operate autonomously, prioritize ruthlessly and move fast with conviction in an AI‑native, global organization, while upholding high standards of craftsmanship and long‑term risk management. 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 car