Senior Counsel, Vendor

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.

Key facts

What you'll do

Lead and shape a collaborative, high-performance team culture grounded in accountability, continuous improvement, and a bias for action.

Negotiate, draft, and execute a broad spectrum of vendor agreements, including technology services, cloud services, SaaS, data platform, contractor, marketing/creative, lease, and payment processing engagements while managing a high volume of deals with speed and sound judgment.

Design, implement, and continuously refine playbooks, contract templates, negotiation guides, and related operational projects to enable the team to operate efficiently at scale, identifying friction points and building solutions that reduce cycle time without sacrificing quality.

Partner closely with procurement, financial partnerships, engineering, product, finance, information security, privacy, and other teams to provide clear, practical, and timely legal guidance.

Act as a proactive, strategic business partner to senior managers across the organization, aligning legal advice with business objectives and risk appetite.

Develop and deliver training and resources that empower business partners to self-serve on routine vendor legal matters, increasing team capacity and reducing bottlenecks.

Maintain deep expertise in vendor-related transactions, ensuring consistency, quality, and attention to detail across all stages of the deal lifecycle.

Drive process improvements and build scalable legal operations tools that support growth, compliance, and audit readiness in a fast-moving technology environment.

Champion best practices in data protection and privacy, applying knowledge of regimes such as CCPA, GDPR, APPs, PIPEDA, and GLBA to vendor agreements and policies.

Continuously learn new products, business models, and market dynamics to provide creative, practical solutions to novel legal and commercial challenges.

Requirements

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 demonstrated through reviewed agreements and related legal documents.

Experience in fintech, payments, or financial services.

Experience supporting global or multi-jurisdictional transactions, including work in Canada, the US, the UK/EU, and 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 for diverse audiences.

Collaborative working style with experience guiding cross-functional teams toward practical, win-win outcomes.

Intellectual curiosity and creative problem-solving instincts, with the ability to quickly learn new products and navigate novel challenges.

Proactive, self-starter mentality with a bias for action and ownership in ambiguous or rapidly evolving situations.

Excellence in judgment, with the ability to balance risk and business objectives while upholding the highest ethical standards.