Senior Market Surveillance Investigator

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.

The Team

Kraken's Market Surveillance function is responsible for detecting, investigating, and reporting market abuse across regulated trading venues, spanning spot crypto markets, crypto futures, tokenised equities, OTC markets, and consumer trading. As our licensing footprint and product range grow, so does the scale and complexity of the surveillance programme behind them.

We are hiring a Senior Investigator to take on the function's most complex casework and help shape how we detect and cover market abuse as the business scales.

The Opportunity

• Own complex investigations end to end, writing findings up to a standard a regulator can rely on, and present conclusions to a range of stakeholders.
• Lead or contribute to periodic threshold and model reviews, recalibrating surveillance rules and alert thresholds as trading behaviour, products, and market structure evolve.
• Support the design, build-out, and integration of surveillance platform capabilities, including onboarding new products, venues, and data sources onto the surveillance system.
• Contribute to market abuse risk assessments, helping identify and score risk across products, jurisdictions, and entities, translating findings into surveillance coverage.
• Use AI and automation tools responsibly to speed up evidence-gathering, case reconstruction, and detection-model development, maintaining human judgement over final decisions.
• Support conflicts of interest, information barrier, and personal account dealing matters across Markets Compliance, extending beyond surveillance casework where buy-side or asset management experience is directly relevant.

What You Bring

• Experience investigating market abuse or trading conduct inside a firm subject to market conduct regulation (exchange, broker-dealer, trading venue, or comparable regulated trading business).
• Track record of running end-to-end investigations, writing findings up to regulatory standards, and presenting conclusions to stakeholders.
• Working knowledge of core market abuse typologies (e.g., spoofing, wash trading, insider trading, front running, ramping).
• Experience with threshold and model calibration, surveillance platform integration, market abuse risk assessments, and audit remediation.
• Comfort using generative AI and automation tools to improve the speed and quality of investigative work while maintaining human oversight.
• Familiarity with a surveillance platform (such as Scila, Nasdaq SMARTS, Eventus, or NICE Actimize) and comfort with SQL or a similar query tool for evidence-gathering.
• Clear, evidence-first written communication for case files, escalations, and regulatory drafts.
• Exposure to crypto-asset markets is welcomed but not required; candidates with traditional securities or derivatives market experience are strongly encouraged to apply.