Senior Counsel – Product (Asia-Pacific)

As Senior Counsel - Product at Kraken, you provide legal and regulatory guidance for product launches and changes across the Asia-Pacific region. You join the Regulatory Legal team, a group of experienced lawyers from traditional finance, fintech and crypto backgrounds who move fast and deliver commercially accountable advice. Based in Hong Kong or Singapore, you operate as a practical legal generalist with a focus on product legal advice, supporting the rollout of derivatives, OTC options, tokenised equities, earn and staking products, custody, and payments offerings across APAC.

What you'll do

• Provide product legal support for APAC launches and enablement across the entire Payward product suite, including xStocks, OTC options, institutional custody and execution, and cross-regional products rolling out across APAC
• Act as a gatekeeper for new APAC outside counsel engagements by scoping work, estimating cost, and signing off before matters are routed externally, ensuring outside counsel is used only where local-law advice is genuinely required
• Translate complex regulatory frameworks into pragmatic, actionable guidance for the business, using plain-English communication, measurable risk trade-offs and decision-ready recommendations
• Use AI-assisted tools, such as those for multi-jurisdiction licensing analysis, first drafts of regulatory submissions and matter tracking, to raise the speed and consistency of the team's work
• Own the APAC regulatory workload under the direction of the APAC regulatory lead, including licence variations, client and broker agreement documentation, licensing structure questions and routine regulator correspondence
• Take ownership of geography-specific licensing in markets such as Kazakhstan, Pakistan and the Philippines, instructing and supervising local counsel in region and in time zone, and supporting other APAC markets such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia as they arise
• Support Payward Group licensing initiatives in key APAC markets such as Singapore and Hong Kong, including preparing application materials and coordinating with outside counsel

What you bring

• Qualified lawyer admitted in Singapore, Hong Kong, England and Wales, or an equivalent common law jurisdiction
• 10 or more years post-qualification experience in financial services regulatory law, gained at a regulated financial services institution (such as a bank, broker-dealer, exchange, derivatives dealer or crypto services provider), at a law firm supporting such clients, or at a relevant regulator
• Demonstrated ability to independently own regulatory relationships and business-as-usual regulatory workstreams, including notifications, information requests and supervisory correspondence
• Strong experience with the financial regulatory landscape in a major Asian financial centre, such as Singapore and the MAS, or Hong Kong and the SFC/HKMA
• Proven ability to instruct, supervise and manage the cost of local counsel across multiple jurisdictions, including in markets where you are not admitted
• Working knowledge of AML/CTF obligations and regulatory expectations
• 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
• A pragmatic, commercially accountable approach to legal and regulatory risk that gives stakeholders a useful range of options and a clear recommendation
• Comfort operating with a high degree of autonomy in a fast-moving, remote, multi-time-zone environment, owning a broad workload from day one

Nice to have

• Experience advising on virtual asset regulation in one or more APAC jurisdictions
• Familiarity with the regulation of derivatives (including OTC options), equities and emerging tokenised financial instruments
• Experience supporting change-of-control notifications or other regulatory aspects of corporate transactions
• Experience with payments, e-money or card regulation
• Working proficiency in a second APAC language
• An authentic interest in crypto and digital assets, and familiarity with Payward's and competitors' products

About Kraken

Kraken, founded in 2011, is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking and OTC services for both individual investors and institutional clients. Kraken is part of Payward, which operates a suite of financial infrastructure platforms including NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks.