Head of Legal

Zatlas; México; Remote; MXN 2,000,000 - 4,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Zatlas, the payments automation platform for hospitality, is seeking its first Head of Legal to own regulatory and compliance across Mexico, Brazil, the US, and Europe. You will lead licensing, data privacy, and cross-border structures, building a scalable function that partners with founders, finance, and product.

You will draft and negotiate commercial terms, master services and privacy notices, design playbooks, and manage external counsel to support rapid growth while maintaining strong

Qualifications

• 8+ years of practice with meaningful in-house time at a technology, payments or financial services company.
• Deep Mexican regulatory fluency and qualification in Mexico or equivalent.
• Cross-border experience (Brazil/US/Europe) with reliable local counsel coordination.
• Strong payments substance: flows, acquiring, merchant-of-record and money transmission.
• Strong commercial contracting skills with enterprise counterparties; professional Spanish and English.
• Comfort with ambiguity and being the sole in-room legal voice; decisive and clear writing.

Responsibilities

• Lead regulatory characterization for Mexico, Brazil, US and Europe; maintain a live regulatory map with clear trade-offs.
• Own master services and collection terms, and vendor/SaaS/DPA templates.
• Shape licensing, structuring, governance, and inter‑company arrangements across regions.
• Draft, negotiate and manage external counsel engagements and budget.

Skills

8+ years in-house experience

Regulatory fluency (Mexico)

Cross-border experience

Payments/commercial contracting

Spanish and English proficiency

Job description

Zatlas is the payments automation platform for hospitality. We help large hotel chains in Latin America — and increasingly in Europe and the United States — turn every reservation from Booking.com, Expedia and other platforms into collected revenue, with far less manual work. We are hiring our first Head of Legal to own the legal and regulatory foundation this cross-border business runs on.

Why this role, and why now

Zatlas sits at the intersection of software and money movement. We collect on behalf of hotels, work with acquirers and card networks, move funds across borders, and hold guest and property data in several jurisdictions. Each of those facts carries a regulatory question, and those questions now need a single owner rather than a series of one-off engagements with outside firms.

The near‑term centre of gravity is Mexico: the characterization of what Zatlas is, from a regulatory and tax standpoint, and what that implies for the licences or exemptions we rely on. But it cannot be answered for Mexico alone — our entities span Mexico, Brazil, the US and Europe, and our expansion path points globally. As the first lawyer here you will draft, negotiate and decide rather than supervise, and design the function itself: how we use external counsel, what we standardise, and what the company simply should not do.

What You Will Own

• Regulation — the priority
• Mexico: lead the regulatory characterization of our activity — whether we need to be a regulated entity, how our collection and closed‑loop flows are treated, and the position we take with the SAT and, where relevant, the CNBV and Banxico. Own the analysis, the conclusion and the plan that follows.
• Brazil: payment‑institution rules, PIX and card‑scheme requirements, consumer protection and LGPD, and the implications for our local entity.
• United States: money transmission and payment‑facilitator questions as we take on US hotel clients, plus obligations attached to our US holding structure.
• Europe: the licensing and structuring path for a European entity — PSD2/PSD3 and e‑money perimeter, GDPR, DAC7.
• Maintain a live regulatory map across the four regions: what applies, what we rely on, what is coming, and what would force a change in how we operate — turned into clear recommendations with the trade‑offs named, not memos that end in "it depends".
• Commercial contracting
• Hotel chain agreements — above all the master services and collection terms governing how we handle clients' money — plus partnerships and distribution with booking platforms and channel partners.
• Payments and infrastructure contracts — acquiring, PSPs, fraud tooling, card‑network programmes. Term, data sharing, liability allocation and chargeback economics are where the value sits.
• Build the playbook: templates, fallback positions, an approval matrix and standard vendor/SaaS/DPA terms, so routine deals stop consuming senior time.
• Corporate, financing and structure
• Financing rounds end to end — SAFEs and priced rounds, data room, diligence, closing — and a clean cap table.
• Employee equity: plan documents, grant mechanics, board approvals, and the cross‑border tax and securities treatment of grants.
• Inter‑company structuring across our Mexican, Brazilian, US and future European entities — with our tax and transfer pricing advisors — so legal form matches economic substance. Plus governance: board and shareholder mechanics, powers of attorney, corporate books.
• Data, privacy and compliance
• Privacy programme across the LFPDPPP, LGPD, GDPR and applicable US state regimes — notices, records, transfer mechanisms, vendor terms.
• AML/KYC and sanctions obligations, in proportion to how we are actually characterised in each market, plus information security and PCI‑adjacent contractual obligations — working with engineering, not around it.
• The customer‑facing surface: terms and conditions, privacy notices, and the risk positions embedded in them.
• People, external counsel and legal spend
• Employment and contractor arrangements in Mexico and Brazil — including the payroll‑versus‑independent‑provider distinction and the risk it carries in each — plus offer letters, confidentiality and IP assignment.
• Select and manage firms in each market, scope engagements tightly, decide what stays in-house, and own a legal budget you can explain.

Who We Are Looking For

MUST HAVE

• 8+ years of practice, with meaningful in‑house time at a technology, payments or financial services company. Firm pedigree is welcome; judgment shaped inside a business is what we are buying.
• Deep Mexican regulatory fluency. The Ley Fintech perimeter, how the CNBV, Banxico, Condusef and the SAT actually behave, and where the real grey areas are. Qualified in Mexico or with equivalent command of the system.
• Cross‑border range — matters handled in Brazil, the US or Europe, with a clear sense of your own limits and how to get a reliable answer out of local counsel rather than the first one offered.
• Real payments substance: flow of funds, acquiring and scheme rules, merchant‑of‑record and payment‑facilitator questions, money transmission and e‑money perimeters.
• Strong commercial contracting skills and the confidence to negotiate directly with large enterprise counterparties and payment providers. Professional Spanish and English.
• Comfort with ambiguity and with being the only lawyer in the room. You are decisive, you write clearly, and you say what you would do.

STRONG PLUS

• Portuguese, or serious commitment to learning it.
• Obtaining or maintaining a payments or e‑money licence.
• Hospitality, travel or OTA commercial models.
• Venture financing from the company side; cross‑border option plans.
• GDPR / LGPD / LFPDPPP programme experience.
• First legal hire, or building a function from zero.

PROBABLY NOT FOR YOU IF

• You want to manage a team from day one — for now, you are the team.
• You prefer to route every question to outside counsel rather than form a view of your own.
• You are looking for settled processes and clean precedent. Much of this work has neither yet; that is the job.

How We Work

We are a small, fast company operating in two languages and four regulatory systems. Decisions get made quickly and in the open, with the reasoning attached — a clear answer we can revisit beats a perfect one that arrives too late. We expect the same from legal: fast, specific, commercially grounded, honest about what we do not yet know. You will work with the Founders on regulatory strategy, financing and structure, with finance on tax and inter‑company matters, and with product and engineering on how the platform handles money and data.

What We Offer

Competitive base, benchmarked for a senior in‑house leader in Mexico City.

Meaningful equity — you are building the company's legal foundation and should own part of the outcome.

Direct access to the Founders and C‑Level, and real influence over where the company grows next.

A budget for the external counsel and tooling to do the job properly.