Senior Counsel, Strategic Partnerships

About the role

At Column, we're looking for a senior lawyer excited to own strategic partnerships end to end, from the first "we want to build with Column" conversation through signing, product development, launch, and ongoing expansion. Instead of handing the work off to a relationship manager or a separate product team, you're the through-line. You will architect novel partnership structures that enable fintechs to deliver modern banking experiences, navigating complex regulatory requirements along the way. You'll work closely with Go-to-Market, Engineering, Finance, Risk and Compliance and have a direct impact on how bespoke financial products are built and delivered at scale. Column's product suite spans accounts, payments, cards, lending, and loan participations, delivered via both domestic and international fintechs to consumers and businesses. This role offers direct access to leadership, will involve daily ongoing work with our external partners, and requires creativity and speed. The Column Legal team does not have Product, Regulatory, and Commercial silos - we believe the most effective lawyers are those who can own partnership launches and expansion end-to-end. You will have access to the best AI tools and Legal Ops support. This role reports directly to the Bank's General Counsel.

Responsibilities

• Own complex agreements end-to-end : Structure, draft, and negotiate complex customer and third-party partnership agreements covering a broad range of banking products and services.
• Lead Subject Matter Expertise: Be a go-to authority on legal and regulatory requirements impacting the bank's products. Share insights on regulatory developments and their practical implications. Help establish Column as a thought leader in banking infrastructure.
• Scale Operations: Design and implement legal processes that can scale with hypergrowth. Improve partner onboarding efficiency while maintaining robust compliance. Build repeatable frameworks that enable the business to move faster. Develop template program agreem

Additional Information

About Column For companies building financial technology and transforming the financial services space, the biggest bottleneck to their growth and innovation is often the underlying banks and infrastructure stack they rely on. We have spent our careers founding and scaling companies like Plaid, Square, Meta, Blend, and Affirm, and have seen this problem firsthand - builders and developers needing to partner with traditional banks, and creating API and abstraction layers over the patchwork that is the bank, its core, and many other vendors. All of this results in a complex (and often expensive) banking supply chain involving a user, fintech, BaaS middleware provider, bank, core and the Federal Reserve. At Column, we set out to simplify and fix this. We are a bank and a software company built from the ground up, offering builders and developers technology-forward banking solutions that cut out the hundreds of vendors, middleware providers, and abstraction layers. This means a safer, more transparent, and less costly banking supply chain. Come build with us!

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