Principal Compliance Associate - Market Surveillance

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.

01The 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 Market Surveillance function is responsible for detecting, investigating and reporting market abuse across our 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're hiring a Principal Compliance Associate to take on the function's most complex casework, and help shape how we detect and cover market abuse as the business scales.

02The 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 capability, 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, and translate findings into surveillance coverage.

• Use AI and automation tools responsibly to speed up evidence-gathering, case reconstruction and detection-model development, always with human judgement over the final call.

• 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.

03What you bring

• Experience investigating market abuse or trading conduct inside a firm subject to market conduct regulation, such as an exchange, broker-dealer, trading venue, or comparable regulated trading business.

• A track record running investigations end to end, including writing findings up to a standard a regulator can rely on and presenting conclusions to stakeholders.

• Working knowledge of core market abuse typologies e.g. spoofing, wash trading, insider trading, front running, ramping.

• Experience with, or strong working knowledge of, threshold and model calibration, surveillance platform integration, market abuse risk assessments, and audit remediation.

• Comfort using generative AI and other automation tools to improve the speed and quality of investigative work, while maintaining the human oversight regulated casework requires.

• 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 - your case files, escalations and regulatory drafts will sometimes be read by auditors and regulators without you in the room to explain them.

• Exposure to crypto-asset markets is welcomed but not required. What matters most is regulated-market investigation experience; strong candidates from traditional securities or derivatives markets are encouraged to apply.

04Nice to haves

• E-comms surveillance experience.

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.

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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