Director of Compliance Operations

Company Mission

Payhawk is a leading global spend management solution for scaling businesses. Headquartered in London and combining company cards, reimbursable expenses and accounts payable into a single product; its future-facing technology enables finance teams to control and automate company spending at scale.

The Payhawk customer base includes fast-growing and mature multinational companies in 32 countries including LuxAir and Wagestream. With offices in New York, London, Berlin, Munich , Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Vilnius and Sofia; Payhawk is backed by renowned investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks, QED Investors, Bek Ventures and Eleven Ventures.

Our values include supporting flat hierarchies, taking ownership and responsibility, seeking and providing feedback, managing constructive critique, and speaking our minds. We understand that the best ideas don’t all come from the same place, so we encourage diversity and inclusion in all areas of our work.

The future of fintech is about more than money, and we believe in work-life balance, continual learning, and empowered teams. We’re also on a journey to measure and improve our environmental and social impact. From virtual cards to digital subscriptions, our software and automation help take paper out of the equation for our customers, too.

We’re changing the world of payments, and we’re looking for an exceptional team to help us. 

 

 

About the Role

To support our next phase of growth, we’re looking for a Director of Compliance Operations to lead and scale our KYC and Monitoring teams. This role brings together strong operational leadership and rigorous compliance: your mandate is to run these teams as a high-performing operation, measurable, efficient, and relentlessly optimized, while upholding the highest standards of compliance and keeping our customers’ experience at the center of every decision.

You’ll own the performance of onboarding and ODD (KYB for corporate customers) and transaction and card monitoring end to end. That means building the metrics, designing the processes, forecasting the capacity, and driving a talented team to hit ambitious targets, all while reducing manual effort through automation and AI. You’ll be the person who turns compliance operations from a cost center into a competitive advantage: faster onboarding, smarter monitoring, lower cost-per-case, and a better experience for the customer.

We seek out top operational talent, and to continue raising the bar we need a leader who is as comfortable reading a throughput dashboard as they are coaching a team lead or challenging a broken process.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, scale, and develop the KYC and Monitoring teams, driving them to clear, measurable targets and a culture of ownership and accountability.
• Define, build, and own the operational metrics that matter: KPIs, SLAs, quality scores, and productivity benchmarks and use them to manage performance day to day.
• Build and maintain FTE forecasting and capacity models, ensuring the team is right-sized for volume growth across markets and product lines.
• Relentlessly optimize and re-engineer processes for speed, quality, and cost, removing manual steps and bottlenecks wherever they exist.
• Champion automation and the application of AI across onboarding and monitoring workflows, partnering with Product and Engineering to ship tooling that scales the operation without scaling headcount linearly.
• Own the selection, performance, and cost of third-party vendors and tooling (screening, identity verification, monitoring, and case management), holding them accountable to clear service and quality standards.
• Put customer needs first in every process decision, reducing friction in KYB onboarding and minimizing false positives in monitoring without compromising control.
• Own the operational delivery of KYB for corporate customers and ongoing transaction and card monitoring, including alert handling, escalation paths, and SLA management.
• Build operations that scale cleanly across multiple entities and jurisdictions, adapting processes to different regulatory regimes while maintaining consistent quality and control.
• Ensure the operation is always audit- and regulator-ready, able to stand behind its quality, controls, and documentation in front of auditors, partner banks, and regulators.
• Partner cross-functionally with Compliance/MLRO, Risk, Product, Engineering, and Customer-facing teams to align operational delivery with regulatory obligations and business goals.
• Report on operational performance to senior leadership, surfacing risks, trends, and the business case for investment.

Requirements 

• Proven experience leading and scaling operational teams in a high-growth, fast-paced environment, with a strong track record of driving teams to target.
• Deep fluency in operational management, building KPIs and SLAs, capacity/FTE forecasting, and managing performance through data.
• A relentless focus on process optimization and automation; you instinctively look for what can be removed, streamlined, or automated.
• Technically minded, with a strong understanding of how AI and automation can transform operational workflows and the ability to partner credibly with Product and Engineering.
• Comfortable being hands-on with data, querying, building dashboards, and digging into the numbers yourself rather than relying on analysts.
• Experience owning third-party vendors and tooling, from selection through performance and cost management.
• A track record of scaling operations across multiple entities and jurisdictions.
• Experience operating in an audit- and regulator-ready environment, comfortable engaging with auditors, partner banks, and regulators.
• An excellent people manager who knows how to motivate, coach, and hold a team accountable to high standards.
• A customer-first mindset, always weighing how a process change affects the end customer’s experience.
• Solid working understanding of KYB processes for corporate customers and of transaction and card monitoring.

Company Benefits

• 30 days holiday paid leave
• Opportunity to use the Payhawk product with a monthly commuting allowance
• Health and Fitness membership
• Private healthcare
• An L&D budget to support continuous development
• Exchange policy to another Payhawk office (Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, London)
• Regular team-wide company events

Please note that unfortunately we cannot provide visa sponsorship, and to be considered for this role, candidates must be able to provide proof of their eligibility to work in the EU.

Payhawk is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.