(Senior) Counsel, Commercial Legal, Japan

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by our unique combination of proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 200,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, Rippling, Navan, Qantas, SHEIN and many more – with fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, spend management and treasury, to embedded finance at a global scale.

Proudly founded in Melbourne, we have a team of over 2,000 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 26 offices around the globe. Valued at US$8 billion and backed by world-leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, Robinhood Ventures, Sequoia, Salesforce Ventures, DST Global, and Lone Pine Capital, Airwallex is leading the charge in building the global payments and financial platform of the future. If you’re ready to do the most ambitious work of your career, join us.

Attributes We Value

We hire successful builders with founder-like energy who want real impact, accelerated learning, and true ownership. You bring strong role-related expertise and sharp thinking, and you’re motivated by our mission and operating principles. You move fast with good judgment, dig deep with curiosity, and make decisions from first principles, balancing speed and rigor.

You're humble and collaborative; turn zero‑to‑one ideas into real products, and you “get stuff done” end-to-end. You use AI to work smarter and solve problems faster. Here, you’ll tackle complex, high‑visibility problems with exceptional teammates and grow your career as we build the future of global banking. If that sounds like you, let’s build what’s next.

About the team

The Legal, Risk & Compliance (LRC) team at Airwallex is a collaborative group of legal minds and risk management experts. We're passionate about safeguarding Airwallex's operations, fostering a culture of compliance and ethical conduct, and ensuring we navigate the global financial landscape with integrity. We provide expert guidance and support to all areas of the business, proactively identifying, mitigating, and managing legal and financial risks.

What you'll do

Airwallex is looking for an experienced Senior Lead Counsel who is fluent in Japanese to support our fast growing commercial legal team across APAC (with an emphasis on our new but fast-growing JP market). You will support a complex set of fintech products that will challenge your problem solving and critical thinking skills. You will support a wide variety of commercial legal matters supporting Airwallex’s growing Sales team, and help us build for scale. This is a strategic leadership position with executive visibility and you will be a key advisor to Airwallex’s APAC go-to-market leadership team and a senior leader on the legal team.

This position is based in Japan.

Responsibilities:

• Drive complex deals. Personally lead negotiations on high-stakes enterprise commercial and strategic partnership deals across APAC (with a strong emphasis on our JP business), many with significant cross-border elements.

• Build for scale. Develop and implement an innovative strategy for delivering efficient and effective commercial legal support. Drive the creation and maintenance of scalable templates, playbooks, and processes to support our rapidly growing business.

• Be a strategic partner. Act as a key advisor to our dynamic, globally distributed commercial leadership. Partner with Sales, Partnerships, and Strategy teams to scale our go-to-market efforts and advance multi-product and multi-jurisdictional deal strategies.

• Enhance Efficiency. Partner with our data and operations teams to leverage technology, automation, and data-driven insights to increase the efficiency and impact of the commercial legal function.

• Collaborate Globally. Work closely and effectively with Airwallex’s global legal, compliance, and risk teams on deals and projects that involve multiple jurisdictions

• Contribute to Culture. Make a positive contribution to the culture of the Airwallex legal team, the APAC leadership team, and the company as a whole.

Who you are

We're looking for people who meet the minimum qualifications for this role. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but are not mandatory.

Must-Haves:

• Law degree from a top law school, 6+ years of post-qualification experience, and at least some experience at a top law firm.

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