Product Manager II - Financial Crime Operations

Job description

Building the Future of Open Finance

Payward - the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks - has spent the last 15 years building one of the most modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platforms in the industry, built to advance an open, global financial system.

The team

Founded in 2011, Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions across the globe. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services, with products built for both individual investors and institutional clients.

Kraken's Compliance Operations teams, including the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), investigations and enhanced due diligence, are the front line of how Kraken detects and responds to financial crime. The systems they run on sit within Core Services Product, alongside the engineering teams who build them. That covers alert ingestion, case management, investigator tooling and a growing set of automation and AI tools.

This role owns the product for that investigation platform. That means how an alert is created, enriched, grouped and suppressed. How it becomes a case. How an investigator reaches and documents a decision. And how every step is evidenced to a regulator or auditor. You'll start with the FIU, where the workflows are most complex and the audit bar is highest, then extend the platform across Compliance Operations.

The opportunity

• Own the investigation-platform roadmap end to end. Sequence it and defend it, and re-sequence it when a regulator or the RCO raises a P0.
• Define "done" before build starts. Write phased deliverables and acceptance criteria that Compliance signs off, and hold the line when scope moves.
• Get requirements in before engineering starts. Build the intake between Compliance policy, monitoring rules and case management so that changes don't reach investigators before their workflows are ready.
• Understand the process before building. Reconcile policy and SOPs against what investigators actually do and what the system actually does. Know the difference between a process fix and a technical one, and say which requests are in scope for engineering.
• Understand the pipeline well enough to challenge it: ingestion, profile and transaction resolution, suppression and grouping logic, and reconciliation between vendor output and case management. Be able to walk an auditor through it with live examples.
• Make auditability a first-class requirement: audit trail, data lineage, evidence retention, reviewer attribution, change-management controls, and validation of filtering and suppression logic.
• Ship automation and AI into regulated workflows with controls that hold up in Compliance, IT and privacy audits. That means human-in-the-loop design, explainability and ongoing monitoring.
• Run the operating rhythm: a shared forum with engineering and adjacent product managers, a regular stakeholder update, and one delivery status that everyone reads the same way.

What you bring

• 4+ years of product management, including 2+ years on financial-crime systems such as transaction monitoring, investigations, case management, KYC/EDD or sanctions screening.
• Working knowledge of how an AML programme is examined, including the questions regulators, internal audit and model validation ask about monitoring, filing and control systems.
• The technical fluency to go deep on data flows and system design with engineers, and to spot when a design won't meet the requirement.
• A track record of shipping internal tools or operational platforms that measurably changed how an operations team works.
• Clear, concise writing, from PRDs and phase plans to audit walkthroughs and executive updates.
• The judgement to tell a senior stakeholder a timeline isn't realistic because the requirements aren't written yet, and to keep the relationship intact.

Nice to haves

• Direct FIU experience, such as alert disposition, SAR/STR filing or leading investigators.
• Crypto or digital-asset experience, such as blockchain analytics, wallet-level transaction analysis or focal vs counterparty logic.
• Experience shipping AI or ML into a regulated investigative workflow, including the control design.
• Build-vs-buy and vendor evaluation for monitoring or case-management tooling.
• Experience with programmes that span jurisdictions (UK, EU/MiCA, US).

Unless a specific application deadline is stated in the job posting, applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.

Please note, applicants are permitted to redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance at or graduation from an educational institution.

We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Our commitment

Payward is powered by people from around the world and we celebrate the diverse talents, backgrounds, contributions, and unique perspectives that everyone brings to the table. We hire based on merit, seeking out people with the right abilities, knowledge, and skills for the job. We encourage you to apply for roles where you don't fully meet the listed requirements, especially if you're passionate or knowledgeable about crypto.

We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments as part of our hiring process. These assessments evaluate competencies relevant to the role and are applied consistently across candidates for similar positions. Results are considered alongside experience and interviews, and are not the sole basis for any employment decision.

As an equal opportunity employer, we don't tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind, whether based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

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