Product Manager II - Financial Crime Operations

As a Product Manager II for Financial Crime Operations at Kraken (part of Payward), you own the investigation platform that sits at the front line 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, defend it, and re-sequence it when a regulator or the Chief Compliance Officer raises a priority issue
• Define acceptance criteria and phased deliverables that Compliance signs off on before build starts, and hold the line when scope moves
• Build the intake between Compliance policy, monitoring rules and case management so that changes don't reach investigators before their workflows are ready
• Reconcile policy and standard operating procedures against what investigators actually do and what the system actually does, knowing the difference between a process fix and a technical one
• Understand the alert pipeline deeply enough to challenge it: ingestion, profile and transaction resolution, suppression and grouping logic, and reconciliation between vendor output and case management, and walk auditors 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, including human-in-the-loop design, explainability and ongoing monitoring
• Run the operating rhythm: a shared forum with engineering and adjacent product managers, regular stakeholder updates, 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
• 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 Kraken (Payward)

Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, founded in 2011 and trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions globally. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services for both individual investors and institutional clients. Payward, the parent company, has spent 15 years building a modern, globally accessible financial infrastructure platform to advance an open, global financial system.