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Kovo is a fintech startup expanding access to financial tools for people historically excluded from traditional credit systems. The company has grown revenue 20x over three years while maintaining exceptional capital efficiency and positive free cash flow. Backed by Inspired Capital and Homebrew, Kovo is shifting from a one-product to a multi-product company and seeking its first dedicated legal and compliance hire to build and scale the function end-to-end.
You will own all legal and compliance responsibilities for Kovo's existing business and new product launches. This is a sole-hire role with no inherited team—you are the function. The company has already built a strong legal and compliance posture over three years that partners and banks have praised as exceeding what they see at much larger companies. Much of this is codified and automated, running smoothly with no active fires. Your role is to maintain this foundation while expanding it for new products and systematically reducing manual work through automation and AI agents.
Your time splits between two primary areas: (1) standing up new consumer financial products from zero to one, working with product and engineering to design each product with the smallest regulatory footprint and fewest new obligations, then scaling them; and (2) owning the existing legal and compliance operations, finding what can be codified, automated, or retired, and running litigation defense, dispute resolution, exams, audits, bank relationships, privacy, and BSA/AML/KYC policy.
You will design each new product by first asking: what is the version that delivers the customer outcome with the fewest licenses and obligations, reusing existing capabilities? You'll define entity, licensing, and bank-partner posture; write necessary policies, procedures, disclosures, and agreements; review marketing and partnerships before launch; and build scalable review processes. As the product suite grows, you'll reconcile postures across products to eliminate duplication rather than layer obligations.
A core part of your role is building agentic workflows for research, drafting, policy maintenance, monitoring, and reconciliation so the operating side requires less of your time each quarter. You hold the quality bar on all agent output—critical thinking and judgment never get delegated. You measure success by how much of the operating side runs without you. Outside counsel is engaged only when something undeniably requires it and cannot be handled agentic ally, with tight scoping and direct relationship ownership.
You'll communicate clearly and quickly with founders, engineering, product, marketing, and customer experience, and represent Kovo with banks, partners, regulators, and auditors. The role reports to a founder based in Austin, TX. The company is fully remote; Austin is a plus but not required.
Kovo's culture emphasizes high ownership with minimal bureaucracy, speed, learning, and impact. Roles and priorities evolve quickly, some systems are still being built, and the pace is intense. You will be the only lawyer, with leverage coming from AI agents, outside counsel, and cross-functional teamwork rather than a dedicated team.
REQUIREMENTS:
- JD and active bar admission in a US state
- Prior legal or compliance role at a fintech startup, ideally fast-growing
- Mid-career experience: enough reps to have taken a regulated consumer product through its full lifecycle, still hungry to build the function yourself
- Strong multidisciplinary background: prior or concurrent work in business, engineering, or product function
- Hands-on with consumer finance stack: FCRA and credit reporting, UDAAP, TILA/Reg Z, ECOA, EFTA/Reg E, state lending and money-transmission licensing, bank partnership programs, BSA/AML/KYC
- Ability to point to a product or program you shaped to need less, not more: a design choice that avoided a license, a program you consolidated, or a process you automated
- Experience managing outside counsel and regulator or bank-partner relationships directly
- Mindset: minimal footprint is how you think; you want to be the function, not lead one; comfortable with high-intensity, full ownership; judgment is the job; energized by expanding financial access
- Work style: extremely organized with uncommon attention to detail; clear, concise writer; technically proficient (comfortable reading code, pulling numbers, building workflows with AI); prefer deleting steps to documenting them; hate AI slop and hold agent output to high standards
