Senior Counsel – Product (Asia-Pacific) - Kraken

Building the Future of Open Finance

Payward — the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks — has spent the last 15 years building one of the most modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platforms in the industry, built to advance an open, global financial system.

The Team

Founded in 2011, Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions across the globe. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services, with products built for both individual investors and institutional clients.

Join our Regulatory Legal team, the group responsible for maintaining and growing Kraken's product offerings across every region we operate in and for advising the business on its day-to-day regulatory obligations. We partner directly with Compliance, Product and senior leadership to keep our licensed entities running smoothly and our regulators well served.

This is a remote role based in Hong Kong or Singapore, supporting our growing volume of regulatory work across the broader APAC region. You will operate as a practical legal generalist with a focus on Product legal advice: supporting launches and product changes across APAC, including derivatives and over-the-counter ("OTC") options, tokenised equities, earn and staking products, custody, and card and payments offerings.

The Opportunity

• Provide product legal support for APAC launches and enablement across the entire Payward product suite, including xStocks, OTC options, institutional custody and execution, and cross-regional products rolling out across APAC.
• Act as a gatekeeper for new APAC outside counsel engagements: scope the work, estimate the cost, and sign off before matters are routed externally.
• Translate complex regulatory frameworks into pragmatic, actionable guidance for the business, favouring plain-English communication and measurable risk trade-offs.
• Use AI-assisted tools (for multi-jurisdiction licensing analysis, first drafts of regulatory submissions, and matter tracking) to raise the speed and consistency of the team's work.
• Own the APAC regulatory workload under the direction of the APAC regulatory lead, including licence variations, client and broker agreement documentation, licensing structure questions, and routine regulator correspondence.
• Take ownership of geography-specific licensing in markets such as Kazakhstan, Pakistan and the Philippines, instructing and supervising local counsel in region and in time zone.
• Support Payward Group licensing initiatives in key APAC markets such as Singapore and Hong Kong.

What You Bring

• Qualified lawyer admitted in Singapore, Hong Kong, England and Wales, or an equivalent common law jurisdiction.
• 10 or more years' post-qualification experience ("PQE") in financial services regulatory law.
• Demonstrated ability to independently own regulatory relationships and business-as-usual regulatory workstreams.
• Strong experience with the financial regulatory landscape in a major Asian financial centre (e.g., Singapore and the MAS, Hong Kong and the SFC/HKMA).
• Proven ability to instruct, supervise and manage the cost of local counsel across multiple jurisdictions.
• Working knowledge of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing ("AML/CTF") obligations.
• Outstanding analytical, drafting, and organisational skills, with crisp, plain-English writing.
• A pragmatic, commercially accountable approach to legal and regulatory risk.
• Comfort operating with a high degree of autonomy in a fast-moving, remote, multi-time-zone environment.