Senior Counsel, Vendor

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.

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,…