Associate II, Product Operations - Kraken

About Payward & Kraken

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

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.

The Team

Krak is Kraken's consumer banking and payments product — a fast-moving team building the card, payments, and financial features that bring crypto to everyday life. The Krak Product Operations team sits at the heart of this, making sure the business can move quickly without getting blindsided by compliance, risk, vendor, or operational dependencies.

This is one of two roles in Krak’s Product Ops function, reporting to the Manager, Product Ops - Krak. You'll bring leadership to the day-to-day, working directly with compliance, legal, fraud, client engagement (CE), and external vendors to make sure new features land safely and successfully.

The Opportunity

Product Ops at Krak is a coordination and intelligence function. Your job is to make sure cross-functional dependencies that could slow or derail delivery are surfaced early, actively managed, and resolved. You'll also help the team make better product decisions by curating operational data and bringing market and vendor intelligence into the room.

Key Responsibilities

Compliance & Risk Coordination

• Maintain live, product-specific trackers of open compliance and legal items, including DRIs, status, and upcoming milestones.
• Triage new features against regulatory requirements ahead of development; ensure sign-off is built into delivery milestones.
• Work closely with fraud leads to ensure fraud controls and risk/velocity rules are factored into feature design (card, third-party payments, and others).
• Ensure fraud and client engagement (CE) teams are operationally positioned — with the right tooling, admin access, battlecards, and support articles — ahead of new product launches.
• Support incident response for product-related issues and ensure post-incident reviews feed into product changes.

Third Party Vendor Management

• Maintain product-specific vendor trackers covering status, open actions, key contacts, and upcoming milestones.
• Own the cadence for performance reviews with key vendors and track actions to closure.
• Maintain a working view of vendor roadmaps and capabilities; produce periodic briefings on where vendor developments create product opportunities or constraints.

Responding to MI & Feature Performance

• Ensure experiments and feature launches are supported by readily available fraud, dispute, and CE metrics alongside commercial KPIs.
• Interpret fraud, dispute, CE, and auth/decline data to identify emerging issues and surface them to the right teams.
• Drive follow-through on cross-functional findings — whether a compliance flag or a vendor issue.

Strategic Market Intelligence

• Scan the market for competitors' changes to features, pricing, and risk positioning.
• Monitor regulatory and market developments that could affect the Krak roadmap.
• Identify third-party vendor capabilities that could enable features not yet on the roadmap; flag where the current stack may be a constraint.

Requirements

• Experience in a product operations, strategy, or programme management role in a consumer fintech, payments, or banking business (ideally at a company with a card or payments product).
• Strong working knowledge of the regulatory and compliance landscape for consumer financial products in one or more regions.
• Experience working alongside or within fraud and risk functions, with an understanding of how fraud controls interact with product design.
• Proven ability to manage multiple concurrent workstreams with different stakeholders and cadences without dropping the ball.
• Track record of turning complex operational data into clear, actionable management information (MI) for product and leadership teams.
• Structured thinker comfortable in the detail while maintaining a view of the bigger picture.
• Strong communicator able to translate between compliance, risk, engineering, and product teams.

Nice to Haves

• Experience with card issuing programmes (scheme rules, chargeback processes, fraud typologies).
• Familiarity with third-party banking and payments vendors (BIN sponsors, scheme processors, TPP aggregators).
• Prior experience in a fast-scaling consumer fintech or neobank.
• Exposure to crypto or digital asset products.