Legal Operations

About Column

For companies building financial technology and transforming the financial services space the biggest bottleneck to their growth and innovation is often the underlying banks and infrastructure stack they rely on. We have spent our careers founding and scaling companies like Plaid Square Meta Blend and Affirm and have seen this problem firsthand builders and developers needing to partner with traditional banks and creating API and abstraction layers over the patchwork that is the bank its core and many other vendors. All of this results in a complex (and often expensive) banking supply chain involving a user fintech BaaS middleware provider bank core and the Federal Reserve.

At Column we set out to simplify and fix this. We are a bank and a software company built from the ground up offering builders and developers technology-forward banking solutions that cut out the hundreds of vendors middleware providers and abstraction layers. This means a safer more transparent and less costly banking supply chain. Come build with us!

The opportunity:

Many banks treat Legal as a cost center. Column treats it as a competitive advantage the teams ability to move at the speed of the business is why it can be so impactful. We are a lean team that punches well above our weight with access to the best AI tools available and we need to 10x our impact without growing headcount. Thats where you come in.

Were looking for the Banks first Legal Operations hire to serve as the teams thought leader on what a modern AI-native Legal function looks like at a regulated financial institution. We are not a SaaS company with standard contracts and plug-and-play provisions the products we build are highly regulated and multi-jurisdictional and the fintech partnerships we launch are bespoke. If a question has an easy answer it doesnt make it to the Legal team this means the tooling that supports our lawyers requires creativity a deep appreciation for the complexity of our regulatory and compliance obligations and a willingness to think beyond standard legal ops solutions.

This is a high-ownership hands-on role for someone who has built or significantly transformed a Legal Ops function and knows how to turn a lean Legal team into a force multiplier. You will work hand-in-hand with the General Counsel to push the team to be faster and smarter eliminating routine tasks and generating capacity to tackle the complex challenges and support growth.

This role reports directly to the Banks General Counsel and is in-person at our Presidio-based office in San Francisco (34 days/week).

What youll do:

• Build the Legal Operating Model

  • Assess the current state of Legals operations define the target operating model and build toward it with urgency.

  • Build and run the operational cadences intake SLAs approval gates cross-functional handoffs with Growth Compliance and Finance that keep the function fast and accountable.

  • Develop KPIs dashboards and reporting mechanisms that give the General Counsel and leadership actionable insight into team performance deal volume cycle times and operational health.

  • Identify operational bottlenecks proactively and implement scalable process improvements if a task takes days today it should take minutes after youre done with it.

• Own Legal Technology & AI

  • Audit existing tools identify gaps and develop a legal technology roadmap covering intake and workflow CLM e-billing knowledge management and AI-assisted workflows.

  • Design and build AI-assisted and agentic workflows. You will not be onboarding dozens of vendors you will use the Banks tools to build your own dashboards playbooks redlining tools and databases.

  • Partner with the Banks Business Operations team to drive the same rigor and tech-forward approach within Legal as everywhere else in the Bank.

  • Own adoption training and change management for new tools and processes the best system is only as good as the teams ability to use it.

• Contract Lifecycle & Knowledge Management

  • Own the legal side of contract lifecycle management intake routing templates repository and reporting in close coordination with Growth and Finance.

  • Design and run the legal intake and triage workflow continuously improving how requests are classified drafted reviewed and closed.

  • Own knowledge management: keep playbooks briefs and templates current versioned and findable; make them the source of truth for the team and the business.

  • Develop and maintain processes for documentation management and retention including operational guidelines best practices and training materials.

• Outside Counsel & Financial Operations

  • Manage outside counsel operations and the legal budget.

  • Review modify and enforce billing guidelines; audit spend and drive cost rigor across external legal relationships.

  • Collaborate with Finance on budgeting forecasting and spend reporting; surface actionable insights from legal spend data.

  • Develop frameworks for strategic firm and vendor selection utilization and performance management.

What youll need to be successful:

• 7 years in legal operations at a high-growth technology company or financial institution

• A builders mentality. AI-native first principles approach to building tools and systems

• Creativity. We are not looking for someone to build a cookie-cutter Legal Ops engine that works well elsewhere you will need the skills to evaluate what we do today whats important to the business and what will make us better.

• Hands-on experience with CLM systems knowledge management outside counsel management

• Strong data and analytics skills you can build the dashboards and metrics that leadership actually uses and you make decisions from data.

• Strong cross-functional operator who can work across Legal Risk Compliance Finance Engineering and Growth and drive adoption without direct authority.

• Hyper-organized project manager: comfortable juggling multiple concurrent workstreams surfacing tradeoffs early driving accountability and knowing when to escalate.

• Scrappy roll-up-your-sleeves attitude with zero ego about getting hands dirty and a positive get-it-done disposition that inspires the people around you.

What youll get from us:

• Comprehensive health dental and vision plans including options that are 100% covered by Column for you and 100% covered for your dependents!

• Comprehensive family planning and fertility benefits via partnership with Carrot including reimbursement of up to $20000 in qualified expenses

• Up to $2000 (post-tax) monthly rent subsidy for employees living within 2 miles of Columns office

• FSA and HSA account options to enable use of pre-tax money for medical and dependent care expenses

• 401k plan including self-directed brokerage options

• Flexible time-off policy - take the time off that you want and need to relax and recharge

• 100% paid parental leave including 16 weeks for birth mothers 12 weeks for primary caregivers and 8 weeks for secondary caregivers

• Up to $4500 in annual reimbursements for backup childcare

• Catered lunches and dinners for SF employees

• Commuter benefits including paid transportation to-and-from the office

• Regular team building events including annual offsite

Pay transparency:

Compensation packages at Column include base salary equity and benefits. New hire offers are made based on a candidates experience expertise geographic location and internal pay equity relative to peers.

The annual US base salary range for this role is $180000 - $235000 equity.

We look forward to hearing from you

Column is committed to working with the best and brightest people from the broadest talent pool possible. We value bringing together a team with different perspectives educational backgrounds and life experiences and believe a diversity of ideas is what allows us to develop the best solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation during the application and recruiting process please reach out to

We participate in the E-Verify program in certain locations as required by law. Learn more about the E-Verify programhere.