Lead, Legal, Compliance & Policy (Americas)
About The Role
Within the Shopify Legal Team, the Compliance Team aims to ensure that Shopify is compliant with regulatory and contractual commitments while remaining agile to encourage growth and innovation. Our team’s mission is to implement and enforce policies and procedures that ensure Shopify complies with applicable laws and regulations so our merchants, partners, and third parties can trust us.
As Shopify continues to expand its financial products and services, we’re also enhancing our Compliance Program. We’re working to strengthen Shopify’s regulatory compliance commitments in areas such as lending compliance, sanctions, anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) to achieve our goal of making commerce better for everyone.
In this role, you will play a significant part in developing and delivering on our strategic compliance roadmap to expand and fortify our Compliance Program. You will interact regularly with our external financial partners and internal stakeholders to ensure our financial products stay in compliance with our regulatory and contractual obligations. You will be responsible for enhancing our existing compliance program, designing and documenting new compliance processes, as well as executing recurring time-bound compliance activities to meet our obligations.
Our ideal candidate is an experienced and enthusiastic professional who has worked in financial services compliance (bonus if in lending compliance), sanctions, KYC or AML. To be successful on our team, you must have an optimistic outlook, enjoy identifying and delivering creative solutions to complex problems, and have a growth mindset. You’re passionate about leveraging a combination of your existing knowledge, great instincts, and strong program management skills to execute projects efficiently and effectively.
You must be a team player with strong documentation, analytical and communication skills. You should be effective at building relationships and influencing others. You must also be adept at problem solving, creativity, and collegiality (both internally and in dealing with external parties) to explain and address compliance risks, while also providing solutions to address these risks.
Responsibilities & Duties
- Managing relationships with our financial partners, as well as vendors, that support various elements of the Compliance Program
- Leading and conducting various activities of our Compliance Program, which may include: testing & monitoring, reporting, AML and Bank Security Act (BSA) related compliance items, annual risk assessments, and audits
- Working collaboratively to grow, develop, and streamline the program according to Shopify’s risk profile
- Developing playbooks, resources, and policies to support our legal, compliance, sanctions, and AML programs
- Leading projects that improve operational efficiency and reduce compliance risk in our products and processes
- Partner cross-functionally to advise lines of business on compliance risks and best practices
- Supporting other key projects within the Legal team
Qualifications
- A Bachelor’s degree in a related field, and/or commensurate work experience or certifications
- Multiple years experience with building, executing, and/or optimizing compliance programs and processes, ideally in a tech or fintech environment
- Deep knowledge of financial services compliance (bonus if in lending compliance), sanctions, KYC or AML.
- Exceptional verbal and written communication skills and attention to detail
- Excellent time management skills - you thrive when working on multiple projects, and are adept at balancing priorities, stakeholders, and deadlines
- A creative, data-driven approach to identifying and solving problems
- Superb research and analytical skills with an eye for identifying trends and driving solutions
Bonus Experience
- Experience with lending and consumer protection compliance (e.g., UDAAP, ECOA)
- Experience working with compliance systems and case management software
- Experience working with financial products and services
- Experience working with data and engineering teams to develop and streamline internal compliance tooling
- Data Management skills (SQL, excel, sheets)
About Shopify
Opportunity is not evenly distributed. Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. We propel entrepreneurs and enterprises to scale the heights of their potential. Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 8,300 employees and generated over $1 trillion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries.
This is life-defining work that directly impacts people’s lives as much as it transforms your own. This is putting the power of the few in the hands of the many, is a future with more voices rather than fewer, and is creating more choices instead of an elite option.
About You
Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone.
Before you apply, consider if you can:
- Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone
- Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth
- Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter)
- Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change
- Bring critical thought and opinion
- Use AI tools reflexively as part of your fundamental workflow
- Embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward
- Work digital-first for your daily work
