Product Manager II - Financial Crime Operations

As Product Manager II for Financial Crime Operations at Payward (parent company of Kraken), you own the investigation platform that sits at the heart of how Kraken detects and responds to financial crime. You start with the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), where workflows are most complex and the audit bar is highest, then extend the platform across Compliance Operations. You'll define how alerts are created, enriched, grouped and suppressed; how they become cases; how investigators reach and document decisions; and how every step is evidenced to regulators and auditors.

What you'll do

• Own the investigation-platform roadmap end to end. Sequence it and defend it, and re-sequence it when a regulator or the RCO raises a P0.
• Define "done" before build starts. Write phased deliverables and acceptance criteria that Compliance signs off, and hold the line when scope moves.
• Get requirements in before engineering starts. Build the intake between Compliance policy, monitoring rules and case management so that changes don't reach investigators before their workflows are ready.
• Understand the process before building. Reconcile policy and SOPs against what investigators actually do and what the system actually does. Know the difference between a process fix and a technical one, and say which requests are in scope for engineering.
• Understand the pipeline well enough to challenge it: ingestion, profile and transaction resolution, suppression and grouping logic, and reconciliation between vendor output and case management. Be able to walk an auditor through it with live examples.
• Make auditability a first-class requirement: audit trail, data lineage, evidence retention, reviewer attribution, change-management controls, and validation of filtering and suppression logic.
• Ship automation and AI into regulated workflows with controls that hold up in Compliance, IT and privacy audits. That means human-in-the-loop design, explainability and ongoing monitoring.
• Run the operating rhythm: a shared forum with engineering and adjacent product managers, a regular stakeholder update, and one delivery status that everyone reads the same way.

What you bring

• 4+ years of product management, including 2+ years on financial-crime systems such as transaction monitoring, investigations, case management, KYC/EDD or sanctions screening.
• Working knowledge of how an AML programme is examined, including the questions regulators, internal audit and model validation ask about monitoring, filing and control systems.
• The technical fluency to go deep on data flows and system design with engineers, and to spot when a design won't meet the requirement.
• 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 tell a senior stakeholder a timeline isn't realistic because the requirements aren't written yet, and to keep the relationship intact.

Nice to have

• Direct FIU experience, such as alert disposition, SAR/STR filing or leading investigators.
• Crypto or digital-asset experience, such as blockchain analytics, wallet-level transaction analysis or focal vs counterparty logic.
• Experience shipping AI or ML into a regulated investigative workflow, including the control design.
• Build-vs-buy and vendor evaluation for monitoring or case-management tooling.
• Experience with programmes that span jurisdictions, including UK, EU/MiCA and US.

About Payward

Payward is the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks. 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, offering spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services.