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Payhawk is a global spend management platform combining company cards, reimbursable expenses, and accounts payable for scaling businesses. Headquartered in London with offices across Europe and North America, the company serves fast-growing and mature multinational companies in 32 countries and is backed by top-tier investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Greenoaks.
This is a broad, hands-on legal counsel role supporting a regulated, multi-jurisdictional fintech. You will serve as the dedicated legal advisor across commercial contracts and regulatory matters touching Payhawk's payment services business, including EMI licensing, PSD2, UK PSRs, GDPR, and CCPA. You will have day-to-day exposure across the full spectrum of legal issues a scaling finance platform faces.
You will advise executive members on how new and existing law affects the business, act as a trusted legal representative internally and externally, and handle the vast majority of work yourself rather than defaulting to external counsel, using outside lawyers selectively for specialist or high-stakes matters.
Key responsibilities include:
**Legal Operations & Process:** Maintain and improve legal processes, systems, and governance as the business scales—contract lifecycle management, approval workflows, document storage, and reporting. Identify and apply AI tools to streamline contract review, drafting, and other legal workflows.
**Client Contracts & Commercial Agreements:** Own drafting, negotiation, and execution of client and partner contracts, including terms specific to regulated financial institution customers. Act as primary legal point of contact for commercial negotiations, disputes, and breach questions. Maintain and improve template agreements, playbooks, and fallback positions.
**Vendor & Third-Party Contracts:** Review and negotiate vendor, supplier, and partner agreements, including data processing terms for new vendors (including AI vendors). Apply consistent vendor contracting approaches with standard terms and self-serve approval processes.
**Employment & General Advisory:** Provide input on employment contracts, policies, and people-related matters alongside HR and external specialists. Field day-to-day legal queries across the company and triage specialist needs.
**Regulatory Advisory (ideal but not required):** Advise on payment services and EMI regulatory questions across jurisdictions. Support responses to regulatory and third-party requests, coordinating with external counsel as needed.
**Requirements:**
- Qualified lawyer (or equivalent legal qualification) with 5+ years post-qualification experience (PQE)
- Significant in-house counsel experience in a tech business, ideally at a regulated fintech or financial services company
- Hands-on experience using AI tools to improve legal efficiency, with genuine enthusiasm for continuing to do so
- Genuine generalist track record spanning commercial and client contracts, vendor contracts, data protection, and disputes, with comfort advising on employment matters
- Experience working across multiple jurisdictions; EU and UK exposure required; US exposure a strong plus
- Comfort operating within a lean in-house legal function, taking on wide-ranging exposure and escalating to external counsel only when genuinely needed
- Sound commercial judgment and ability to communicate legal risk clearly to non-legal audiences
- Excellent communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills; arbitration and mediation experience is a plus
- Working knowledge of payment services regulation (EU PSD2, UK PSRs) and GDPR/CCPA, or demonstrated ability to get up to speed quickly in a regulated environment
Note: Candidates must be able to provide proof of eligibility to work in the EU. Visa sponsorship is not available.
