Director, Litigation and Regulatory

About this role

About Sezzle:

With a mission to financially empower the next generation, Sezzle is revolutionizing the shopping experience beyond payments, blending cutting-edge tech with seamless, interest-free installment plans that make shopping smarter and more accessible. We're not just transforming payments; we're redefining how people discover, interact with, and purchase the things they love while driving real impact on merchant sales through increased conversions and higher order values. As we continue to shape the future of fintech and retail, we're building an innovative, dynamic team passionate about creating more than just a transaction but a truly unique shopping journey. If you're excited about pushing boundaries in tech and delivering a game-changing experience for consumers and merchants alike, come join us at Sezzle and help create the future of shopping!

About the Role:

Sezzle is a publicly traded consumer finance company (Nasdaq: SEZL) building purchase-now-pay-later products for consumers who are underserved by traditional credit, and we are pursuing a de novo national bank charter. That combination puts us in front of regulators, plaintiffs' counsel, and state enforcement authorities more often than a company our size would normally be, and we handle almost all of it in-house.

This role is for a lawyer who wants to own that work rather than route it. You will run litigation and pre-litigation disputes, manage regulatory inquiries and investigations from federal and state authorities, and serve as the legal owner of our privacy and data protection framework. You will have real autonomy on day one, direct access to the executive team, and the budget discipline of a lean function that brings in outside counsel deliberately rather than reflexively.

What You'll Do:

• Litigation and disputes

• Manage consumer litigation, class actions, arbitrations, and commercial disputes from intake through resolution, including case strategy, discovery, and settlement posture.

• Direct outside counsel where we use it: scope, budget, staffing, and strategy. You set the plan; they execute it.

• Own litigation holds, ESI protocols, custodian identification, and the discovery process end to end.

• Manage the small-claims and arbitration pipeline, and build the process improvements that keep volume from becoming a drag.

• Identify the patterns behind repeat disputes and take them back to product, operations, and collections so the underlying problem gets fixed.

Regulatory inquiries and investigations

• Manage civil investigative demands, examination requests, subpoenas, and informal inquiries from the CFPB, FTC, state attorneys general, and state financial regulators.

• Run productions: scope negotiation, data collection, privilege review, and delivery, working with engineering, data, and compliance.

• Draft response letters, white papers, and advocacy submissions, and participate directly in regulator meetings.

• Track the enforcement and supervisory landscape across BNPL, UDAAP, credit reporting, debt collection, and consumer disclosure, and translate it into concrete guidance for the business.

• Support supervisory readiness as we build toward bank charter approval and the examination posture that follows.

Privacy and data protection

• Serve as legal owner of the privacy framework: policies, notices, records of processing, data mapping, and retention.

• Advise on state comprehensive privacy laws, GLBA, FCRA, CAN-SPAM, TCPA, and the pixel and session-replay wiretap theories that continue to generate demand letters and class actions.

• Review vendor and partner data flows, negotiate data protection terms, and handle escalated consumer privacy rights requests.

• Partner with the Chief Compliance and Privacy Officer on incident response and on the operational privacy program.

AI and how the function scales

• Use AI to multiply your own throughput across research, document review, discovery, production, drafting, and regulatory tracking, and keep pushing what that stack can do.

• Build durable tooling, not one-off prompts: skills, workflows, templates, and automations that outlive the matter they were built for and that the rest of the team can run.

• Champion responsible AI adoption across the company. Legal is a builder here, not a brake. You will help business teams find ways to use these tools well and help set the guardrails that make that possible.

• Advise on AI governance as a legal matter: model use, vendor diligence, data handling, disclosure, and the emerging regulatory picture.

Advisory and cross-functional

• Counsel product, marketing, engineering, and collections on live questions with practical answers, not memos that end in “it depends.”

• Build the playbooks, templates, and internal training that let the function scale without adding headcount.

What We Look For:

• Bachelor's degree from an accredited law school and active bar membership in good standing in at least one US jurisdiction. You will need to satisfy in-house counsel registration requirements in your home state where they apply.

• 5 to 7 years of combined law firm and in-house experience.

• Substantive consumer financial services experience. You know Reg Z, Reg B, FCRA, FDCPA, TCPA, and UDAAP as working tools, not as an outline you once memorized.

• Demonstrated ownership of litigation matters and regulatory inquiries, including at least some experience running them without a partner above you.

• Clear, direct writing. You lead with the answer.

• Fluent and enthusiastic use of AI as a core part of how you practice. You are not experimenting at the margins; you build workflows, prompts, and tooling that materially change your own output, and you want to keep doing that here.

• Demonstrated experience working with Claude or equivalent large language model tools is required; candidates must be comfortable leveraging AI to enhance productivity, research, and communication.

Preferred Qualifications

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