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.

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. This role owns the product for that investigation platform—covering alert ingestion, case management, investigator tooling, and a growing set of automation and AI tools.

The Opportunity

• Roadmap Ownership: Own the investigation-platform roadmap end to end. Sequence, defend, and re-sequence it when regulators or the RCO raise a P0.
• Definition & Scope: Define "done" before build starts. Write phased deliverables and acceptance criteria that Compliance signs off on, and hold the line when scope moves.
• Requirements & Intake: Get requirements in before engineering starts. Build the intake between Compliance policy, monitoring rules, and case management.
• Process Alignment: Reconcile policy and SOPs against what investigators actually do and what the system actually does. Distinguish between process fixes and technical ones.
• Pipeline Understanding: Challenge the pipeline—ingestion, profile and transaction resolution, suppression and grouping logic, and reconciliation between vendor output and case management.
• Auditability: Make auditability a first-class requirement including audit trails, data lineage, evidence retention, reviewer attribution, and change-management controls.
• Automation & AI: Ship automation and AI into regulated workflows with controls that hold up in Compliance, IT, and privacy audits (human-in-the-loop, explainability, ongoing monitoring).
• Operating Rhythm: Run a shared forum with engineering and adjacent product managers, regular stakeholder updates, and unified delivery statuses.

What You Bring

• 4+ years of product management, including 2+ years on financial-crime systems (transaction monitoring, investigations, case management, KYC/EDD, or sanctions screening).
• Working knowledge of how an AML programme is examined by regulators, internal audit, and model validation.
• Technical fluency to go deep on data flows and system design with engineers.
• 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 manage stakeholder expectations and push back on unrealistic timelines.

Nice to Haves

• Direct FIU experience (alert disposition, SAR/STR filing, leading investigators).
• Crypto or digital-asset experience (blockchain analytics, wallet-level transaction analysis).
• Experience shipping AI or ML into regulated investigative workflows.
• Build-vs-buy and vendor evaluation for monitoring or case-management tooling.
• Experience with multi-jurisdictional programmes (UK, EU/MiCA, US).