Principal Compliance Associate - Market Surveillance

As a Principal Compliance Associate in Market Surveillance at Kraken (part of Payward), you own the platform's most complex market abuse investigations and help shape how the surveillance programme evolves as the business scales. Kraken's Market Surveillance function detects, investigates and reports market abuse across regulated trading venues spanning spot crypto markets, crypto futures, tokenised equities, OTC markets, and consumer trading.

What you'll do

• Own complex investigations end to end, writing findings 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, while maintaining 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

What 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 to a standard a regulator can rely on and presenting conclusions to stakeholders
• Working knowledge of core market abuse typologies such as spoofing, wash trading, insider trading, front running, and 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

Nice to have

• E-comms surveillance experience

About Kraken

Kraken, founded in 2011, is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions globally. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services. Kraken is part of Payward, a parent company that also operates NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks, building modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure to advance an open, global financial system.