🇬🇧 London (Bond Street) — 100% in-person
💰 Competitive (incl. equity)
About Zuba
Careers @ Zuba
About the role
We're looking for a Member of Specialist Staff (Legal & Reg) to own Zuba's legal and regulatory function as we scale across new payment corridors. This is our first dedicated hire covering both commercial legal and compliance, and we're designing the role for the way this work actually gets done now.
Large parts of traditional legal and compliance execution are being transformed by AI. Tools like Claude can produce first-pass MSAs, review onboarding files and draft regulatory memos faster than any associate or analyst. We don't need someone to do that work manually at scale. We need someone who can build the systems that make it happen and who has the judgment to know when the output is right.
Half your job is commercial: drafting, negotiating and closing the contracts that let us move money through new corridors. The expectation is speed. When we identify a new market opportunity, legal should be able to open that corridor in a week, not a quarter. The other half is regulatory: licensing strategy, KYB operations, sanctions and blockchain screening, transaction monitoring and the controls that keep us compliant across Canadian, US, EU and African jurisdictions.
What you’ll own
Three workstreams sit at the centre of this role:
- Licensing: applications and maintenance, multi-jurisdiction. Standing up and keeping live our authorisations as we grow: MSB registration and RPAA registration in Canada, CASP and payment-institution (PSD2) authorisation in the EU, and FinCEN registration plus selective state money-transmitter licensing in the US. You own the applications themselves, the regulator correspondence, and the ongoing maintenance and reporting obligations that follow approval.
- Market launch. Turning a new corridor from idea into live transaction: securing licensing and regulatory clearance with both authorities and banking partners, and papering the commercial relationships (MSAs, partner and payment-infrastructure agreements) that make the corridor operational. Launch is where legal, compliance and commercial converge, and you run all three.
- Compliance systems and controls. Designing the policies and building the operational machinery: KYB onboarding, sanctions and PEP screening, transaction monitoring, and blockchain / on-chain screening for crypto flows. You then implement and tune the tooling that runs it. Your systems become the playbook.
Why this might excite you
- Legal and regulatory from a single seat. You own both, so you see how commercial terms create regulatory exposure and how licensing constraints shape deal structure
- Speed as a design principle. Templatised agreements, automated generation, AI-assisted review. When the business finds a new corridor, your job is to open it in a day
- Build the infrastructure from scratch. Contract templates, onboarding frameworks, screening and monitoring routines and escalation processes. Your systems become the playbook
- Multi-jurisdictional from day one. Canadian MSB / RPAA, US FinCEN (and possible state MTLs), European CASP / PSD2, and a growing number of African regulatory regimes
- Direct regulator, bank and counsel interaction. You'll be in the room, not briefing someone who is