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.
What You'll Be Doing- 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
Who You Are- 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
Bonus Points- 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
The Interview Process- Stage 1: A 45-minute Google Meet video call with a member of the Talent team
- Stage 2: A 45-minute Google Meet video call with the Head of Risk
- Stage 3: A take-home case study followed by a 60-minute Google Meet video call with our Risk leadership team
- Stage 4: A 45-minute Google Meet video call with a cross-functional partner (Product, Engineering, or Operations)
- Stage 5: A 45-minute in-person interview with a member of the Executive team
