Assistant General Counsel – Product and Regulatory Legal (EU)

As an Assistant General Counsel, Product and Regulatory Legal for the EU at Payward (parent company of Kraken), you will serve as a senior legal adviser to European leadership on new products, licensing structure and regulatory strategy. You join the Product and Regulatory Legal team, embedded with Kraken's Product, Design and Engineering teams to ship novel products and experiences. Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions globally, offering spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services. You will advise on complex questions that cut across multiple regimes at once, for example when a single product such as a tokenised equity, a card, or an institutional custody and prime brokerage service touches MiFID II, MiCA, PSD2, EMD2 and banking rules simultaneously.

What you'll do

• Own cross-functional product counselling for European Union launches from discovery to design, launch and iteration, giving Product, Engineering, Compliance and leadership decision-ready advice with clear options and risk trade-offs
• Advise on the regulatory perimeter and classification of new offerings across MiFID II and MiFIR, MiCA, EMIR, payment services and electronic money rules, and banking regulation, including where an instrument or service falls between regimes such as tokenised securities, crypto-asset derivatives, margin and financing, and stablecoin-linked products
• Advise on payments and electronic money offerings, including the Kraken card and account propositions, safeguarding, open banking and account-access obligations, and the developing Payment Services Directive 3 and Payment Services Regulation framework
• Advise on banking-related questions that arise in the European Union, including bank partnerships and sponsor-bank arrangements, deposit-taking and lending perimeter questions, the Capital Requirements Regulation and Directive, and the interaction of these rules with custody, prime brokerage and financing products
• Monitor and interpret European Union legislative and supervisory developments, take part in consultations and industry association work where appropriate, and translate their significance for the business proactively
• Draft and negotiate client-facing terms and conditions, taking clear, business-aligned positions
• Act as gatekeeper for European Union outside counsel engagements by scoping the work, estimating and managing cost, and signing off before matters go externally
• Mentor and develop more junior lawyers in the team, set quality standards for plain-English, risk-based advice, and act as a senior sounding board for colleagues across the Regulatory Legal team
• Use AI-assisted tools such as Enterprise GPTs to speed up regulatory analysis, first drafts and matter tracking, and to build self-service tools that let stakeholders answer commoditised legal and regulatory questions themselves
• Advise on anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing requirements affecting products, including the Transfer of Funds Regulation (Travel Rule) and the new European Union anti-money laundering package, and on market abuse, conduct, outsourcing and operational resilience obligations, including DORA
• Lead or oversee licensing, authorisation and variation workstreams in the European Union, including scoping requirements, mapping pathways, supervising outside counsel, preparing application materials and managing regulator interactions

What you bring

• Qualified lawyer admitted in Ireland, England and Wales, or another European Union Member State
• 15 or more years' post-qualification experience in financial services regulatory law, gained at a regulated financial services institution such as a bank, payment institution, broker-dealer, exchange, central counterparty or crypto services provider, or at a leading law firm supporting such clients, ideally with in-house or direct product counselling experience
• Deep, current knowledge of several of the following, with real depth in at least two: MiFID II and MiFIR (investment services, market structure, derivatives and conduct), MiCA (crypto-asset services, custody, trading platforms and stablecoins), European Union payment services and electronic money regulation, and European Union banking regulation
• Demonstrated ability to analyse novel products against overlapping regimes and give a clear view on classification and perimeter, including in areas where the rules are unsettled or supervisors have not yet spoken
• Direct experience managing senior regulator relationships, including notifications, information requests, supervisory correspondence and examinations
• Working knowledge of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing, outsourcing and operational resilience obligations, including DORA
• Proven ability to instruct, supervise and manage the cost of outside counsel across multiple jurisdictions
• Outstanding analytical, drafting and organisational skills, with crisp, plain-English writing
• Ability to distil complex legal and regulatory issues into clear, actionable guidance for non-lawyer stakeholders and for senior leadership
• A pragmatic, commercially accountable approach to legal and regulatory risk that gives stakeholders a useful range of options and a clear recommendation
• Experience mentoring or managing lawyers, and the judgement to know when to escalate
• Comfort operating with a high degree of autonomy in a fast-moving, remote environment
• Familiarity with using AI tools such as Enterprise GPTs to increase the efficiency of legal services

Nice to have

• Experience advising on tokenised securities and the European Union Distributed Ledger Technology Pilot Regime
• Experience with EMIR, including the clearing obligation, margin for non-centrally cleared derivatives and transaction reporting
• Experience with prime brokerage, securities financing, margin lending or institutional custody
• Experience advising on the United Kingdom cryptoasset regime or other non-European Union frameworks that intersect with European Union operations
• Experience supporting regulatory aspects of corporate transactions, such as change-of-control notifications and entity migrations
• Experience with European Union data protection and consumer protection rules as they apply to financial products
• Fluency in a second European language
• An authentic interest in crypto and digital assets, and familiarity with Payward's and competitors' products

About Payward

Payward is the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks. Founded in 2011, Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions across the globe, and is built to advance an open, global financial system.