Deputy General Counsel

Open Standard; San Francisco, New York (CA, NY); On-site; USD 220,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

Open Standard is building internet-native money with OUSD. We are hiring a Deputy General Counsel to build a legal function alongside our GC, operating with AI agents and a lean outside counsel network.

You will partner across product, policy, and regulatory teams to shape deals, DPA terms, and licensing paths in a fast-moving crypto environment. This role is based in San Francisco and reports to the General Counsel.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of legal experience in-house or equivalent.
• Expertise in stablecoins, banking and payments regulatory landscape.
• Experience using AI to support legal workflows.
• Admitted to practice in a US jurisdiction.
• Ability to work independently and with AI agents and outside counsel.
• Strong writing and regulatory strategy skills.

Responsibilities

• Shape the product with product and engineering teams: minting, redemption, rewards, wallet integrations, and new use cases.
• Structure and negotiate partner and liquidity agreements, custody, and cross-chain terms.
• Engage directly with banks, card networks, and asset managers on diligence and regulatory questions.
• Identify creative deal terms or regulatory paths when the obvious option is unavailable.
• Help steward governance models where partners own the product.
• Support Head of Policy on regulator engagement and industry work.
• Lead regulatory strategy for GENIUS Act and state/international regimes.
• Build AI-native legal workflows, including contract review and diligence questionnaires.
• Manage outside counsel in the US and abroad with tight coordination.

Skills

Legal experience

In-house crypto

Regulatory knowledge

Commercial negotiation

AI in legal practice

Tools

Regulatory databases

Job description

About Open Standard

Open Standard is building internet-native money. Data moved to the cloud, and dollars will move onchain. When they do, stablecoins become core financial infrastructure.

Our stablecoin, Open USD (OUSD), is built for that shift. Minting and redeeming are free at any volume. Nearly all reserve revenue goes back to the businesses that grow adoption. The partners who use OUSD govern it, rather than a single issuer.

OUSD is live on Base, Ethereum, Solana, and Tempo. Our founding partners are Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe, and Visa, and more than 200 banks, payment networks, fintechs, and crypto companies have signed up to use OUSD. Our CEO is Zach Abrams, who co-founded Bridge (acquired by Stripe for $1.1B) and previously led product at Brex, Coinbase, and Square.

OS is currently a team of about ten. We have a real shot at being the next inevitable transformation in stablecoins. We're hiring someone to help make us inevitable.

The role

We're hiring a Deputy General Counsel to help build the legal function at Open Standard alongside our General Counsel, a Founding Team member of Open Standard, who was also part of the founding team of Bridge. You'll be a partner to the GC, not a direct report in the usual sense. The two of you will divide the work by comparative advantage, and you'll own your areas end to end. We are AI-centric, highly scaled, and don't plan on building a large legal team for the foreseeable future. You'll do the work yourself, with AI agents and a tight group of outside counsel extending your reach.

Legal sits at the center of OS's business. You'll be integrated into OUSD design choices, partner deals, and launch decisions, all of which present needle moving commercial opportunities that depend on thoughtful legal decision making that unlocks value for the business.

What you'll do

• Shape the product with our product and engineering teams: mint and redemption flows, partner rewards, wallet and chain integrations, and new use cases from cross-border payments to agentic commerce.

• Structure and negotiate the deals OUSD runs on: network partner agreements, reserve and custody relationships, exchange and liquidity arrangements, and agreements with chains and protocols.

• Work directly with the world's largest banks, card networks, and asset managers, answering their diligence, risk, and regulatory questions with credibility.

• Find the creative structure when the easy answer is "no": the deal term, product change, or regulatory path that gets a partner live.

• Help steward a new kind of governance model, with a company owned and governed by the partners who use its product.

• Support our Head of Policy on regulator and policymaker engagement, comment letters, and industry work.

• Assist with regulatory strategy for OUSD under the GENIUS Act and state and international regimes. This covers licensing paths, issuer and reserve arrangements, and how rewards and distribution are treated.

• Build an AI-native legal function, using agents and workflows for contract review, diligence questionnaires, regulatory tracking, and partner questions.

• Manage outside counsel in the US and abroad tightly, and know when not to use them.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have 10+ years of legal experience, including substantial in-house time at crypto companies.

• Know the stablecoin market cold from three angles: commercial, regulatory, and product. You can explain how issuers make money, how reserves and redemption work, what GENIUS changes, and where the market is going next.

• Have worked with or inside large financial institutions and understand how banks, card networks, and asset managers make decisions. You earn their trust without starting to act like them.

• Have creative commercial instincts and use them to shape deals and products, not just paper them. You're a regulatory and product lawyer who structures deals, not a contracts specialist who knows crypto.

• Are scrappy and do the work yourself, from the first draft to the board memo.

• Already use AI seriously in your practice, and have built agents or workflows that expand what one lawyer can do.

• Write clearly and precisely, because most decisions here start in writing.

• Are admitted to practice in a US jurisdiction.

Strong candidates may also have

• Worked in-house at a stablecoin issuer

• Worked in a bank's digital assets group, alongside crypto-native experience

• Worked on stablecoin or payments licensing: trust charters, state money transmission, or non-US regimes such as MiCA

• Helped build the legal function at an early-stage company

• Relationships with regulators, policymakers, or industry groups in payments and digital assets