Director, Compliance

Relay • San Francisco, CA

4d • $255,000 - $315,000

About The Position

Relay is a digital banking platform that gives self-made business owners the tools and know-how to be great with money—bringing clarity, confidence, and control to every dollar earned, so they can turn hard work into lasting success. We do this by replacing financial guesswork with real visibility, transforming cash flow from a constant source of stress into a clear signal owners can use to run stronger, more resilient businesses. Relay is scaling rapidly, and Compliance is the pillar that determines how fast we can scale safely. We've set ourselves ambitious goals for the next five years: growing transaction volume nearly 9x, launching credit and lending products, and expanding what we do for customers every single year. These are aspirations, not certainties — and hitting them depends on having a compliance program that is genuinely excellent. Not one that slows the business down, and not one that waves things through. We're looking for a leader who believes those two things are the same problem, solved with better data, better design, and better evidence — and who wants to be the person who helps us get there. As Director of Compliance, you'll own Compliance Strategy and Operations end-to-end: AML, sanctions, KYB/CDD, regulatory change, monitoring and testing, and the operational engine that runs it all. You'll own the compliance relationship with our sponsor bank — from day-to-day partnership through exams, audits, and new product approvals. And you'll build the team behind it, setting the standard for what "good" looks like as we grow. This is a build role, not a maintain role. The program you design becomes the thing that unlocks launch velocity with our banking partner, opens the door to banking-infrastructure optionality, and lets us bring products to market at the pace our customers need. You'll be building it with a Risk organization that is investing heavily in unified decision data, entity resolution, and agentic operations — which means your program can be evidence-driven and automated in ways that most compliance functions still only talk about. At Relay, your work has real reach — helping millions of SMBs operate safely and confidently, while protecting the integrity of our banking partnerships and our license to operate. If you want to build a modern compliance function from the ground up, with the mandate and the tooling to do it properly, this is the role for you.

Requirements

• You have 8+ years of compliance experience in fintech, banking, or payments, including time leading a compliance function or a major pillar of one
• You've built compliance programs, policies, and control frameworks from the ground up — not just inherited and maintained them
• You've owned a program's effectiveness personally, and you understand the difference between a program that looks compliant and one that holds up under scrutiny
• You've managed a sponsor bank, regulator, or examiner relationship directly, and you know that credibility is built between exams, not during them
• You lead through data. You're comfortable defining the metrics that prove a control works, and you'd rather show a regulator a dataset than a memo
• You're technically fluent enough to be dangerous — you can reason about how monitoring systems, decisioning platforms, and data pipelines actually work, and you can hold your own with Engineering on what needs to be logged and why
• You've hired, coached, and grown compliance talent, and you're energized by building a team's standard rather than just its output
• You genuinely believe compliance enables growth. You've said no when it mattered, and more often you've found the path to yes that nobody else could see
• You're a strong communicator across every altitude — a board deck, a bank exam response, an engineering ticket, and a hard conversation with a product leader
• You thrive in fast-paced environments, tackling ambiguity, building process where none exists, and raising the bar across the team
• You're actively using AI tools in how you work today and you're excited to push what's possible with them

Nice To Haves

• You have experience with charter applications, second sponsor bank diligence, or banking-as-a-service program structuring
• You're familiar with compliance and financial crimes tooling like Unit21, Sardine, Alloy, Middesk, Hawk, or similar
• You have experience across multiple product types — deposits, cards, ACH, RDC, acquiring, or credit
• You've joined a company at its early stages and have seen it through scale
• You have experience working in a fintech startup or scale-up

Responsibilities

• Own the Compliance Program: Build and own Relay's compliance program end-to-end — AML, sanctions, KYB/CDD, and regulatory compliance — including the policies, procedures, risk assessments, and controls that underpin it across every product and rail
• Program Governance: Be accountable for program effectiveness — investigations and suspicious activity governance, escalation paths, issue management through to validated remediation, and the internal standards that keep the program defensible
• Sponsor Bank Partnership: Own the compliance relationship with our sponsor bank — day-to-day partnership, exam and audit readiness, issue resolution, product approvals, and the management information package that demonstrates our control environment
• Build an Evidence Engine: Design the monitoring, testing, and reporting infrastructure that lets us prove control effectiveness with data rather than assertion — producing a complete, examination-grade customer risk picture in hours, not weeks
• Financial Crimes Strategy: Set the strategy for transaction monitoring, investigation, and suspicious activity reporting — designing detection that meets the highest regulatory standard while keeping legitimate customers moving
• Perpetual KYB & Customer Diligence: Move us from periodic review to continuous re-verification — ownership drift, entity status, industry change, adverse media — with a particular eye on synthetic business identity, the fastest-growing attack on SMB fintech
• Enable the Business: Partner with Product, Engineering, Risk, and Operations to embed compliance requirements into new products and features from the design stage, so compliance becomes a design input rather than a launch gate
• Regulatory Change Management: Track the regulatory landscape — FinCEN program effectiveness expectations, Nacha fraud monitoring obligations, sanctions developments, post-Synapse sponsor oversight — and translate change into concrete updates to our controls and roadmap
• Build and Lead the Team: Hire, coach, and grow the Compliance pillar across both strategy and operations. Set the structure, the career paths, and the standard of work
• Scale Operations Without Scaling Headcount Linearly: Push AI and automation into compliance operations so agents assemble evidence, summarize, and draft while your team disposition, contain, and attest — capacity grows with volume, headcount grows with judgment
• Measure What Matters: Run the pillar on a paired scorecard — risk outcomes alongside customer friction — so we never buy compliance performance with unnecessary customer disruption, or vice versa
• Board and Leadership Reporting: Provide clear, periodic reporting to senior management and the board on program health, emerging risk, and issue remediation

Benefits

• You push relentlessly for reinvention: You're always asking "how can this be better?" -- in your work, in your craft, in yourself. Comfort is a signal to push harder, not coast. You'd rather build something better than defend something familiar.
• You crave autonomy: We trust our team with big challenges and the freedom to solve them. If you’re someone who takes initiative, is comfortable taking risks, and seeks input when needed, you’ll find the freedom here empowering.
• You own your work: You take pride in your work, follow through on commitments, and feel a deep sense of responsibility for outcomes, not just tasks.
• You build with AI, not just use it: You're actively embedding AI into how you work, pushing what's possible, and bringing your team along with you.
• You care about impact, not noise: You care deeply about the substance of your work. You measure success by results, not recognition, and you let your work speak for itself.
• You’re energized by complexity and ambiguity: You enjoy tackling problems that don’t come with a playbook. You’re comfortable building from scratch, iterating as you go, and collaborating to shape the best path forward.
• You seek out feedback: You see directness as respect, not criticism. You actively seek input, sit with hard truths, and use feedback as fuel for improvement.
• Small businesses are why we're here: Relay exists to help them thrive -- and that mission has to resonate with you.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed