Fintech Product and Regulatory Counsel

There are usually two paths for an experienced fintech regulatory lawyer: (1) go after a GC seat, where the openings are scarce and the ones that do appear tend to ask for breadth you have never had the chance to build (because you have been the fintech regulatory person); or (2) go (back) to a firm, where you can stay deep for as long as you are willing to originate and bill.

We are building a third one. Here you stay deep in fintech product and regulatory work—that is the whole job—but you do it across a dozen companies instead of one, without having to originate, pitch, or track your day in six-minute increments. The range you see doing it is wider than most lawyers get in five years at a single company.

And if what you actually want is to become a full-stack GC, we would like to be your on-ramp. A lot of strong product and regulatory lawyers want that and cannot find a way in. For the right person we will deliberately build the breadth—corporate, commercial, employment, privacy—by pulling you into that work alongside the GCs who own it, so that you leave here able to run a legal department, whether that’s at Istari or elsewhere.

About Istari Legal

Istari provides our clients with a fraction of a legal department, rather than a fraction of a lawyer: legal department as a service. Our clients generally fall into two buckets: (1) early-stage companies that need their first in-house legal partner, as early as incorporation, and (2) solo GCs and small in-house teams who need additional capacity. Clients pay a flat monthly fee for a primary counsel who knows their business, a bench of specialists standing behind that counsel, and a systems and ops layer most early-stage companies could never build on their own.

How the model works

The GC
Every client gets one lawyer who owns the relationship. They are in the client’s Slack and inbox, they learn the business, and they act as a strategic partner. Our GCs are full-stack generalists by necessity.

The Bench
That is where this role sits. The Bench is the group of subject-matter experts standing behind every GC, so no one has to get over their skis or send a client to an expensive outside firm. Most of our clients are fintechs, which makes fintech product and regulatory expertise the most load-bearing seat on the Bench.

The System
Templates, playbooks, ops, and AI tooling built once and reused across every client, plus a growing client-facing layer. The System is what lets a small team deliver like a much larger one.

What you would actually do

Client work drives this role. Our GCs have fintech experience of their own—this seat does not exist because they cannot handle a regulatory question. It exists because depth and capacity are different problems. A GC who is the primary relationship for several clients cannot also be the person who reads a new state licensing regime end to end, and should not have to be.

The work
You are the escalation point for fintech product and regulatory questions across the whole client base: licensing and chartering strategy, money transmission analysis, bank partnership and BaaS structures, lending and credit products, digital assets, embedded finance, and the compliance programs that have to sit under all of it. You advise on product at the design stage, when the answer is still cheap, rather than after launch. You draft the terms, disclosures, and agreements that carry the regulatory positions you take. You give a clear answer with a stated confidence level, and you distinguish a real risk from a theoretical one. And you carry enough of the substantive load that our GCs can spend their time where clients most need them: relationships, judgment, and strategy.

The System, as a byproduct of the work

Every matter should leave something behind: a state-by-state licensing matrix, a product-review framework, a sponsor bank diligence checklist, a marketing and UDAAP review standard, a regulatory change digest filtered for materiality. Do the client work, then ask what should exist so the next version of that question takes an hour instead of a day. Done consistently, that is what makes the whole firm faster. It is also the difference between a specialist who becomes a bottleneck and one who becomes leverage.

Responsibilities

• Serve as Istari’s subject-matter expert on fintech product and regulatory issues across all clients.
• Advise GCs on licensing and chartering strategy, including money transmission, lending licenses, MSB registration, bank charters, exemptions, and state-by-state footprint decisions.
• Advise on bank partnership and BaaS arrangements, including program agreements, oversight and audit obligations, and what the bank’s regulator will ultimately require of the fintech.
• Draft terms of service, MSAs, and other agreements to support client products.
• Advise on compliance program design: BSA/AML, KYC/CDD, UDAAP, Reg E, Reg Z, Reg B and ECOA, FCRA, fair lending, complaints management, and vendor oversight.
• Draft disclosures and review marketing copy.
• Review product and feature design at the point of design, and give product teams a workable alternative rather than only a no.
• Build and own the fintech regulatory layer of the System, including playbooks, matrices, checklists, review frameworks, and operational processes.
• Track regulatory change and tell GCs what actually moved and what to do about it, filtered for materiality.
• Join client calls when the question warrants it, then hand the relationship back to the GC.
• Provide second-look review on high-stakes regulatory positions.
• Help decide what Istari builds next, what we automate, and where AI does the work.

Qualifications

• Active US bar license in good standing.
• 7+ years of relevant legal experience.
• In-house experience at a fintech or financial services company. This one is not flexible—we want someone who has lived with a product team, not only advised one from the outside.
• Genuine depth in one or more of: payments, banking-as-a-service, lending, money transmission, digital assets, embedded finance, securities, and/or compliance.
• A track record of advising on product at the design stage, not just reviewing it after the fact.
• Clear, concise writing. Most of your output is written and other lawyers rely on it without re-deriving it.
• Comfort building reusable artifacts rather than only answering one-off questions.
• Ability to operate independently with no supervision.
• High comfort with technology and AI-assisted legal workflows.
• Willingness to say "I don’t know yet, here’s how I’ll find out, here’s when you’ll have it."

Preferred

• Prior law firm experience in fintech regulatory or financial services work, on top of the in-house time.
• Privacy and data protection experience. Product counsel often end up owning privacy, and it pairs naturally with fintech regulatory work: GLBA, the state privacy laws, and the retention conflicts that come with regulated recordkeeping. We are actively building out this capability, so overlap here is genuinely useful. Nice to have, not a must.
• Time on the bank or sponsor-bank side, or working across the bank/fintech line.
• CCO or compliance-officer experience.
• Regulatory examination, inquiry, or enforcement experience.
• Having stood up a licensing footprint from scratch.
• Exposure to more than one fintech—pattern recognition across companies is highly valuable in this seat.

Compensation

• Base: $200,000–$240,000, depending on experience.
• Profit sharing. Equity in a law firm doesn’t work the way startup equity does, so we do this instead. Everyone here should be invested in how the firm grows, including retention, efficiency, and new business.
• Origination credit on any clients you bring in. Originating is not part of this job and nothing here depends on it — but if you bring in work, you are paid for it.

Working arrangement

The role is full-time.

We'll also seriously consider strong candidates who want to come in part-time, whether that's a step toward full-time or a permanent arrangement. Reach out and we can discuss!

Remote from anywhere—you’ll never have to worry about a looming RTO. A US bar license is required, and you need to be available during US business hours for client work.

How to apply

When you apply, Wellfound will ask you “What interests you about working for this company?” Instead of answering this question, please respond with:

1. What is one fintech regulatory question you have answered so many times it should have become a template by now—and why hasn’t it?
2. Tell us about a time you told a product team no. What did you offer them instead?