Product Legal Counsel / Legal Manager

About Shufti

Shufti is a global leader in AI-powered identity verification (IDV) and anti-money laundering (AML) solutions, offering advanced KYC (Know Your Customer), KYB (Know Your Business) and KYI (Know Your Investor) services that enable businesses to onboard customers securely and meet regulatory requirements. Founded in 2017 and trusted by industry leaders in FinTech, Crypto, Banking, E-commerce, and iGaming, our technology delivers real-time verification in over 240 countries and territories empowering a safer, fraud-free digital world.

Position Purpose

Shufti seeks a Product Legal Counsel to operate at the intersection of Legal, Product, Engineering, and Commercial functions, with direct responsibility for ensuring that product design, feature deployment, and customer-facing representations are legally sound, commercially viable, and defensible across multiple jurisdictions.

This role is central to enabling product velocity without exposing the business to regulatory classification risk, misrepresentation risk, or structural compliance failures. The successful candidate will not operate as a passive reviewer of product outputs but as an embedded legal partner responsible for shaping how products are designed, positioned, and delivered in regulated environments.

Key Responsibilities

• You will act as the primary legal interface for Product and Engineering, providing clear, commercially grounded legal input across the full product lifecycle, including design, development, launch, and iteration. You will assess and advise on the legal implications of biometric processing, AML/KYC workflows, fraud detection systems, and AI-driven features, ensuring alignment with applicable regulatory frameworks across key jurisdictions.
• You will translate complex regulatory requirements into actionable product guidance, ensuring that engineering and product teams can implement compliant solutions without unnecessary delay or over-engineering, while maintaining a defensible legal position.
• You will take ownership of identifying and analysing regulatory classification risks, including whether specific product features or service configurations may bring Shufti within the scope of regulated activity in particular jurisdictions, and will escalate and structure mitigation strategies accordingly.
• You will support enterprise sales processes by advising on product-related legal and regulatory queries, ensuring that all representations made to customers are accurate, consistent, and aligned with contractual commitments and internal risk positions. You will engage directly with sophisticated counterparties, including regulated financial institutions, and will be expected to defend Shufti's product positioning where required.
• You will draft, review, and refine product-related contractual provisions, including service descriptions, acceptable use terms, regulatory disclosures, and technical annexes, ensuring consistency between product functionality, legal documentation, and customer-facing statements.
• You will contribute to the development of internal legal playbooks, regulatory summaries, and guidance materials, but will also be expected to challenge and evolve these frameworks where they do not reflect current regulatory or commercial realities.
  
  

What Success Looks Like In The First 90/180 Days

First 90 Days (Foundation & Integration)

• Complete a baseline assessment of Shufti's existing product portfolio, including biometric processing, AML/KYC workflows, fraud detection systems, and AI-driven features, identifying key legal and regulatory risks for each.
• Establish relationships with Product, Engineering, and Commercial teams, and embed yourself into at least two active product development sprints or feature launches to understand current workflows and pain points.
• Review and document Shufti's current approach to regulatory classification risk for at least three priority product lines across key jurisdictions, identifying gaps or inconsistencies.
• Participate in at least two enterprise sales or customer due diligence engagements to understand product-related legal queries raised by sophisticated counterparties.
• Deliver an initial risk assessment report to leadership, including a prioritised roadmap for addressing product legal risks and classification concerns.
  
  

First 180 Days (Execution & Enablement)

• Provide legal input on at least three product features or new deployments from design through to launch, with documented evidence of compliance and defensible positioning.
• Develop or update at least two product-related legal frameworks (e.g., product legal playbook, regulatory classification guidance, acceptable use terms) based on the initial assessment and ongoing regulatory developments.
• Successfully defend Shufti's product positioning in at least two enterprise customer negotiations or due diligence processes, with documented positive outcomes or no material findings.
• Produce a formal regulatory classification analysis for at least two priority jurisdictions, including reasoned positions on whether specific product features constitute regulated activity.
• Deliver at least one internal training session to Product and Engineering teams on translating regulatory requirements into product design, including common pitfalls and escalation protocols.
• Establish a process for ongoing product legal review, including a documented workflow for triaging new features, assessing classification risk, and providing timely legal input without blocking velocity.
  
  

Experience And Profile

• You will have approximately four to seven years of post-qualification experience, with a material portion of that experience gained in a recognised international law firm or a top-tier in-house legal team within fintech, payments, regtech, SaaS, or a similarly regulated environment.
• You will have demonstrable experience in product counselling within regulated or data-intensive businesses, including exposure to financial crime frameworks, consumer protection considerations, and emerging AI governance regimes.
• You will have experience advising on multi-jurisdictional product issues and will be comfortable operating in environments where regulatory positions are not always settled and require reasoned, defensible interpretation.
• You will be able to operate credibly in enterprise-facing contexts, including supporting negotiations and due diligence processes with sophisticated customers.
  
  

Mindset And Operating Model

• You will combine strong legal judgement with commercial awareness, understanding when to enable and when to constrain. You will be comfortable making decisions within defined parameters and escalating where appropriate, but you will not rely on escalation as a default operating model.
• You will be expected to operate in a high-growth environment where ambiguity is common, and where legal input must be delivered quickly without sacrificing quality or defensibility.