Head of Global Transaction Monitoring

Remitly•Arlington, VA

2d•$208,000 - $260,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Remitly's transaction monitoring program runs across our licensed jurisdictions and more than 170 receive countries, against a product set that keeps growing. Every new license, product, corridor, and rail changes what has to be monitored, and every regulator we answer to has its own expectations about how. This role owns the intellectual center of that program: the policy, the standards behind the procedures, and the coverage methodology that determines which financial crime typologies are monitored, how, and to what standard, worldwide. You are accountable for the answer to the question every examiner eventually asks, which is how Remitly knows its monitoring covers the risk it actually has. You do not run the investigative queues. You define what the queues are looking for and prove the coverage holds as the business, the regulations, and the threat all move.

Requirements

10+ years in financial crime compliance, with deep transaction monitoring ownership at a global financial institution, payments company, or fintech.
Demonstrated ownership of a monitoring coverage methodology or risk coverage framework, including the ability to defend scope decisions to a regulator.
Strong command of financial crime typologies across AML, sanctions, and fraud, and how they manifest differently by product, geography, and payment rail.
Hands-on analytical capability. You can interrogate the data behind a threshold decision yourself, with SQL or equivalent, and you understand tuning statistics well enough to challenge them.
Experience with monitoring technology and with model-based detection, including model governance, validation, and the limits of explainability.
Track record operating a monitoring program under regulatory examination in multiple jurisdictions, and owning the resulting findings through closure.
Experience translating regulatory change and new product launches into monitoring requirements on a deadline.
Executive-grade written and verbal communication, with the credibility to hold a position under examiner pressure.
Experience leading and building teams.

Nice To Haves

Cross-border payments, money transmission, or remittance experience.
Multi-jurisdictional depth across US, UK, EU, APAC, or LATAM regimes, including local monitoring and reporting obligations.
Experience with ISO 37301 or equivalent compliance management system frameworks.
Experience operating under a consent order, enforcement action, or monitorship.
CAMS, CFCS, or equivalent.

Responsibilities

Own the global transaction monitoring policy and the standards governing scenario design, thresholds, tuning, model validation, documentation, and change control.
Set the procedural standards that regional and operational teams execute against, and oversee local variations required by jurisdictional obligations without fragmenting the global program.
Maintain the control documentation and evidence set that demonstrates the program's design and operating effectiveness to examiners, auditors, and partner bank due diligence.
Own Remitly's transaction monitoring coverage methodology: the framework that maps financial crime typologies to products, geographies, channels, and rails, and establishes what constitutes adequate coverage for each.
Maintain the coverage assessment as a living artifact, with defensible rationale for what is in scope, what is out, and why.
Identify and quantify coverage gaps and false negative exposure, prioritize them against risk, and drive remediation to closure with accountable owners.
Direct scenario strategy: what gets built, retired, retuned, or replaced, and on what evidence.
Establish the intake process that captures signals from regulators, examinations, partner banks, regional compliance teams, the strategic investigations function, and industry bodies, and converts them into coverage decisions.
Own the assessment of regulatory change for monitoring impact, and drive the resulting scenario, threshold, and procedural changes on a schedule that meets the obligation.
Assess new products, corridors, payment rails, and partner arrangements for monitoring implications before launch, and set the coverage requirements they must meet.
Respond to emerging typologies and industry risk intelligence with concrete changes to detection rather than acknowledgment.
Define and operate the metrics that demonstrate whether monitoring is effective, not just operating: alert quality, escalation and conversion rates, scenario yield, tuning outcomes, and reporting quality.
Own the tuning and optimization cycle, including the analytical basis for threshold changes and the documentation that makes them defensible.
Partner with Compliance Assurance, Internal Audit, and model risk on testing and validation, and own remediation of findings.
Report program health, coverage posture, and material gaps to the Chief Compliance Officer, executive leadership, and board-level oversight.
Partner with Data Science, Engineering, and Product to build and deploy detection, including where machine learning models are used, and set the governance around model use, explainability, and validation in a monitoring context.
Work with the global operations organization to ensure scenario intent is understood and reflected in investigative outcomes, and use those outcomes as evidence in tuning.
Work with Regional Compliance Officers to ensure the global framework satisfies local obligations and that local intelligence flows back into coverage.
Represent the monitoring program to regulators, examiners, partner banks, and auditors.
Lead and develop the monitoring policy, coverage methodology, scenario strategy, and oversee tuning.
Build the standards, documentation discipline, and analytical rigor that make the program repeatable rather than dependent on individuals.