Legal & Compliance Lead (Early-Stage Startup)

Core Responsibilities

Join Kovo as the sole Legal and Compliance Lead, owning the function end-to-end for both current and future products. This role is ideal for a practicing attorney with high-growth fintech startup experience who thrives in a hands-on, operator-driven environment.

Key Fit Criteria

• You’re a practicing attorney with legal and compliance experience in a high-growth fintech startup and prefer building the function yourself rather than inheriting a team.
• Your approach to new initiatives prioritizes minimal obligations over exhaustive compliance.
• You’ve worked in engineering, product, or business roles alongside your legal career and think like an operator.
• You prefer automating tasks out of existence rather than owning them long-term.
• You’re interested in setting the foundation for a multi-product company.

About Kovo

• Kovo is expanding access to financial tools for people historically excluded from traditional credit systems, building products that help establish financial identity and unlock opportunity.
• Over three years, Kovo has grown revenue 20x while maintaining exceptional capital efficiency, ranking above the 99th percentile in revenue per employee benchmarks.
• The team combines venture-scale ambition with profitable business discipline, achieving positive free cash flow early to focus on long-term growth.
• Backed by Inspired Capital and Homebrew, Kovo is built by alumni from Plaid, Experian, Chime, and more, aiming to scale the company another 20x.

Why Join Us?

• Direct impact on millions of people’s ability to access credit.
• High ownership with minimal bureaucracy.
• Core values centered on speed, learning, and impact.

Why Not Join Us?

• Roles and priorities evolve quickly.
• Some systems and processes are still being built.
• The pace of execution and career growth is intense (not optimized for work-life balance).
• You will be the only lawyer and leverage comes from agents, outside counsel, and cross-functional teamwork.

About the Role

Kovo is transitioning from a one-product to a multi-product company. This role sets the legal and compliance foundation for that shift, offering a career-defining opportunity.

What You Inherit

• A legal and compliance posture already recognized as stronger than companies of similar or larger size.
• Much of the posture is codified or automated and has run smoothly for years—no fires to put out.
• The previous counsel built this posture from scratch over three years and left when it was complete.
• The minimum requirement is maintaining the current standard as growth accelerates, with the expectation that manual work keeps shrinking.

Where Your Time Goes

• Most of your time will go toward standing up new products from zero to one, then scaling them. Products target low-income, subprime, or underserved consumers, leveraging AI to mediate transactions.
• For each product, focus on designing the version that delivers the customer outcome with the fewest licenses, fewest new obligations, and most reuse of existing assets.

Scope

• Primary: Regulatory and product work, including marketing review, partnerships, licensing, policies, procedures, litigation defense, BSA/AML/KYC, fraud policy, and privacy.
• Secondary: Corporate, tax, intellectual property, labor and employment, and other needs of a growing company.
• You report to a founder based in Austin, TX, and the role is fully remote.

What You’ll Do

Stand Up New Products

• Collaborate with product and engineering to design new products with minimal licensing and obligations.
• Define the entity, licensing, and bank-partner posture for each product.
• Write and approve policies, procedures, disclosures, and agreements for each product.
• Review marketing, product flows, and partnerships before they ship, building scalable review processes.
• Reconcile the posture across the product suite, removing duplication.

Own Existing Posture

• Maintain current legal and compliance operations at the expected standard.
• Codify, automate, or retire existing processes.
• Handle litigation defense, dispute resolution, exams, audits, and bank/partner compliance.

Run the Function on Agents

• Build and maintain agentic workflows for research, drafting, policy maintenance, monitoring, and reconciliation.
• Hold the quality bar high on everything produced by these workflows.
• Measure success by how much of the operating side runs without your direct involvement.
• Engage outside counsel only when necessary, scoping work tightly and owning the relationship.

Communicate

• Provide clear, fast, written answers to founders, engineering, product, marketing, and customer experience teams.
• Represent Kovo with banks, partners, regulators, and auditors.

About You

Mindset

• Minimal footprint is your default mindset, not just a policy.
• You want to be the function, not lead one. Building legal and compliance for a multi-product company yourself is your motivation.
• Comfortable in a high-intensity role with full ownership and accountability.
• Judgment is critical—you know what agents can draft and what only you can sign off on.
• Energized by expanding financial access for underserved people.

How You Work

• Extremely organized with an uncommon attention to detail.
• Clear, concise writer with answers that are understood on the first read.
• Prefer deleting steps over documenting them.
• Technically proficient—comfortable reading code, pulling your own numbers, and building workflows with AI tools.
• Hate AI slop—hold agent output to a higher standard than your own first draft.

Experience

• JD and active bar admission in a US state.
• Prior legal or compliance role at a fintech startup, ideally fast-growing.
• Mid-career with experience taking a regulated consumer product through its full lifecycle.
• Strong preference for a multidisciplinary background, including business, engineering, or product experience.
• Hands-on with the consumer finance stack: FCRA, UDAAP, TILA/Reg Z, ECOA, EFTA/Reg E, state lending and money-transmission licensing, bank partnership programs, and BSA/AML/KYC.
• Experience shaping products or programs to need less, not more.
• Experience managing outside counsel and regulator/bank-partner relationships.