Paxos

General Counsel

Paxos$210K — $250K *
Legal & Accounting
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • JD from an accredited law school and active bar admission in at least one US jurisdiction.
  • 8-12 years of legal practice, with a mix of experience from a top law firm and in-house at a digital asset or fintech firm.
  • Expertise in digital asset regulations, with a strong track record in token classification and licensing.
  • Strong background in secured lending or structured finance, with practical experience drafting related documentation.
  • Experience handling offshore structures and multijurisdictional legal matters.
  • Understanding of digital asset product mechanics, including smart contracts and related technologies.
  • Experience in a sole legal officer role, with a willingness to build a legal team as the company grows.

Responsibilities

  • Develop and oversee legal and regulatory strategy for a diverse range of financial products.
  • Negotiate and finalize commercial agreements for all organizational transactions.
  • Conduct regulatory analysis on cryptocurrencies, ensuring compliance with securities and commodities laws.
  • Manage corporate governance frameworks including entity formation, board activities, and financing documentation.
  • Implement compliance protocols covering AML, KYB, and partner onboarding processes.
  • Act as the primary legal advisor in direct negotiations, engaging with counterparties autonomously.
  • Address employment, intellectual property, privacy, and general corporate legal issues as they arise.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to establish and build the legal function from the ground up.
  • Engagement with innovative financial products at the cutting edge of digital assets.
  • Potential for flexibility in remote work arrangements, evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Full Job Description
Who we're looking for

Our products sit at the intersection of stablecoins, tokenized commodities, and institutional DeFi, which means the legal work runs from regulatory characterization to structured credit documentation to enterprise contracting, often in the same week.

We are seeking a General Counsel capable of moving between the commercial negotiation of stablecoin earn agreements, substantive regulatory analysis, and corporate governance matters in a single day. As the sole legal officer of the organization, the General Counsel will be responsible for establishing the legal function, not for maintaining one that already exists.

Responsibilities
  • Own legal and regulatory strategy across the full product line, including stablecoin earn, stablecoin orchestration, tokenized commodities and lending.
  • Draft, negotiate, and close every commercial agreement that comes through the organization.
  • Lead regulatory analysis and positioning. Produce defensible characterizations for securities, commodities, money transmission, and virtual asset service provider positioning
  • Own the corporate structure. Manage entity formation and maintenance, board governance, intercompany arrangements, cap table matters, and financing documentation.
  • Own the compliance stack, including AML and sanctions programs, KYB and counterparty onboarding, due diligence questionnaire responses, and the policy suite supporting institutional counterparty relationships.
  • Serve as the legal voice in commercial negotiations, sitting directly with counterparties rather than behind the deal team.
  • Handle employment, IP, privacy, and general corporate matters as they arise.
Qualifications
  • JD from an accredited law school and active bar admission and good standing in at least one US jurisdiction.
  • 8 to 12 years of practice, ideally combining a top-tier law firm foundation with in-house experience at a digital asset or fintech company.
  • Demonstrated digital asset regulatory expertise. You have taken positions on token classification, distribution structures, and licensing questions and defended them to counterparties, auditors, and regulators.
  • Transactional depth in secured lending or structured finance. You have papered facilities, and thought carefully about perfection and enforceability.
  • Experience working with offshore structures and juggling multijurisdictional coverage.
  • Working fluency in how digital asset products actually function. You can understand smart contract architecture at a conceptual level and understand what a vault, an oracle, or a liquidation mechanism does before you write about it.
  • Comfort operating without a team beneath you, and interest in building one as the company scales.
Location

We are a heavily in-person team working in New York City. We prize effective in-person coordination that allows us to move fast. We also consider remote work on a case by case basis.

Once we receive your application, we'll be in touch if we are interested.

About Paxos

Paxos is a regulated financial institution building infrastructure to enable movement between physical and digital assets. Paxos is the first blockchain company to be granted a charter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Paxos? mission is to modernize finance by mobilizing assets at the speed of the internet. Paxos is building a future where all assets?from money to commodities to securities?are digitized and can move instantaneously, 24/7. Headquartered in New York, Paxos has offices in London, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Learn more about Paxos
Size
200 employees
Industry
Founded
2012

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at Paxos

More Legal & Accounting Jobs

Find similar General Counsel jobs: