Head of Global Transaction Monitoring (UK based)

Job Description:

At Remitly, we believe everyone deserves the freedom to access, move, and manage their money wherever life takes them. Since 2011, we've tirelessly delivered on our promise to customers sending money globally, providing secure, simple, and reliable ways to manage their money, ensuring true peace of mind. Whether it's supporting loved ones back home, growing a business across continents, or pursuing new opportunities abroad, we're not just here to move money— we're here to move our global customers forward.
We're looking for builders, reimaginers, and global thinkers who want to work at the intersection of technology, trust, and transformation. If that's you and you're ready to do the most meaningful work of your career—we invite you to join over 2,800 passionate Remitlians worldwide who are united by our vision to transform lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders.

About the Role:

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.

You Will:

Policy and standards

- 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.

Coverage methodology

- 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.

Signal intake and response

- 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.

Effectiveness and assurance

- 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.

Partnership and delivery

- 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.

Team

- 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.

You Have:

• 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.

Our Benefits:

• Paid Vacation Days
• Health insurance
• Commuter benefit
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Mental Health & Family Forming Benefits
• Continuing education

Our Connected Work Culture: Driving Innovation, Together

At Remitly, we believe that true innovation sparks when we come together. Our Connected Work Culture fosters dynamic in-person collaboration, where ideas ignite and challenging problems find solutions faster.

Under the Company's current hybrid-work expectations, employees in this position work onsite Tuesday through Thursday each week. Additional onsite attendance may be required based on business needs, and the Company may modify its hybrid-work expectations from time to time. These intentional in-office moments are vital for deepening relationships, fueling creativity, and ensuring your impact is felt where it matters most.

Remitly is an E-Verify Employer

At Remitly, we are dedicated to ensuring that our workplace offers equal employment opportunities to all employees and candidates, in full compliance with applicable laws and regulations.

Remitly is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.