Senior Counsel, Vendor

About the Legal, Compliance, and Public Affairs team 

The Legal, Compliance, and Public Affairs team is a group of dedicated professionals committed to helping Affirm scale, innovate, and provide outstanding products for consumers, merchants, and key partners. We combine legal, compliance, and policy expertise to guide growth, shape products, and build trust across our ecosystem. Our work spans multiple professional disciplines and provides the foundation for Affirm’s mission to deliver honest financial products.

About the role

Affirm seeks a practical, proactive, and people-oriented transactional attorney to lead and grow our Vendor Legal team. Reporting to the Senior Director, this role is responsible for managing a team, setting priorities, driving operational execution, and serving as a key stakeholder partner across the organization. You will also maintain a personal deal portfolio, staying close to the work and modeling the standard of quality, speed, and judgment you expect from your team.

You are pragmatic, solutions-oriented, and comfortable balancing risk with business velocity in a high-growth, technology-driven environment. You know how to build and motivate a team, develop talent, and create the systems and processes that scale a legal function. The right person will be equal parts team builder, trusted advisor, process architect, and deal closer. This is a unique opportunity to help rebuild the Vendor Legal team from the ground up.

What you'll do

• Foster a collaborative, high-performance team culture grounded in accountability, continuous improvement, and a bias for action.
• Lead negotiation, drafting, and execution of a wide range of vendor agreements, including technology services, cloud services, SaaS, data platform, contractor, marketing/creative, lease, and payment processing engagements. Manage a high volume of deals with speed and sound judgment.
• Design, implement, and continuously improve playbooks, contract templates, negotiation guides, and other projects that enable the team to operate efficiently at scale. Identify friction points and build solutions that reduce cycle time without sacrificing quality.
• Work closely with procurement, financial partnerships, engineering, product, finance, information security, privacy, and other teams to provide clear, practical guidance.
• Serve as a proactive, strategic business partner to senior managers across the organization. 
• Develop and deliver training and resources that empower business partners to self-serve on routine vendor legal matters, increasing team capacity and reducing bottlenecks.

What we look for

• JD and active membership in good standing with at least one U.S. state bar.
• 8+ years of relevant transactional experience in-house at a technology company or in a technology practice group at a top law firm.
• 2+ years of direct people management experience, including hiring, developing, and performance-managing attorneys or legal professionals.
• Exceptional drafting skills.
• Experience in fintech, payments, or financial services.
• Experience supporting global or multi-jurisdictional transactions  (e.g., Canada, US, UK/EU, Australia).
• Strong working knowledge of data protection and privacy regimes such as CCPA, GDPR, APPs, PIPEDA, and GLBA.
• Proven ability to manage high deal volume while maintaining quality, consistency, and attention to detail.
• A track record of building or improving legal processes, playbooks, templates, or other operational tools in a high-growth environment.
• Clear, concise communication skills, with the ability to distill complex legal and commercial issues into plain language.
• Collaborative working style, with experience guiding cross-functional teams toward practical, win-win outcomes.
• Intellectual curiosity and creative problem-solving instincts: you learn new products and business models quickly and enjoy finding solutions to novel challenges.
• Proactive, self-starter mentality with a bias for action.
• Excellent judgment, and ability to make timely, pragmatic, and business-focused decisions in ambiguous situations with imperfect information.
• Humility, integrity and a sense of humor; you take your work seriously, but not yourself.

Base Pay Grade - O

Equity Grade - 8

Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.

Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents.)

USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $220,000 - $280,000

USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $195,000 - $255,000

Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

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