Associate II, Product Operations

Payward - the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks - has spent the last 15 years building one of the most modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platforms in the industry, built to advance an open, global financial system.

Before you apply, we encourage you to explore our culture page to understand what drives us and how we work.

Founded in 2011, Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions across the globe. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services, with products built for both individual investors and institutional clients.

Krak is Kraken's consumer banking and payments product — a fast-moving team building the card, payments, and financial features that bring crypto to everyday life. The Krak Product Operations team sits at the heart of this, making sure the business can move quickly without getting blindsided by compliance, risk, vendor, or operational dependencies.

This is one of two roles in Krak’s Product Ops function, reporting to the Manager, Product Ops - Krak. You'll bring leadership to the day-to-day, working directly with compliance, legal, fraud, client engagement (CE), and external vendors to make sure new features land safely and successfully.

Product Ops at Krak is a co-ordination and intelligence function. Your job is to make sure that the cross-functional dependencies that could slow or derail delivery are surfaced early, actively managed, and resolved. You'll also help the team make better product decisions by curating the right operational data and bringing market and vendor intelligence into the room.

You'll work across four areas: compliance and risk co-ordination, third party vendor management, responding to management information (MI) and feature performance, and strategic market intelligence. Your job is to make sure the right conversations happen at the right time, and that nothing falls through the cracks on the way to launch.

Compliance & risk co-ordination

• Maintain live, product-specific trackers of open compliance and legal items, including DRIs, status, and upcoming milestones

• Triage new features against regulatory requirements ahead of development; ensure sign-off is built into delivery milestones

• Work closely with fraud leads to ensure fraud controls and risk/velocity rules are factored into feature design (card, third party payments, and others)

• Ensure fraud and CE teams are operationally positioned - with the right tooling, admin access, battlecards, and support articles - ahead of new product and feature launches

• Support incident response for product-related issues and ensure post-incident reviews feed into product changes

Third party vendor management

• Maintain product-specific vendor trackers covering status, open actions, key contacts, and upcoming milestones

• Own the cadence for performance reviews with key vendors and track actions to closure

• Maintain a working view of vendor roadmaps and capabilities; produce periodic briefings on where vendor developments create product opportunities or constraints

Responding to MI & feature performance

• Ensure experiments and feature launches are supported by readily available fraud, dispute, and CE metrics alongside commercial KPIs

• Interpret fraud, dispute, CE, and auth/decline data to identify emerging issues and surface them to the right teams

• Drive follow-through on cross-functional findings - whether that's a compliance flag or a vendor issue

Strategic market intelligence

• Scan the market for competitors' changes to features, pricing, and risk positioning

• Monitor regulatory and market developments that could affect the Krak roadmap

• Identify third party vendor capabilities that could enable features not yet on the roadmap; flag where the current stack may be a constraint

• Experience in a product operations, strategy, or programme management role in a consumer fintech, payments, or banking business - ideally at a company with a card or payments product

• Strong working knowledge of the regulatory and compliance landscape for consumer financial products in one of more regions

• Experience working alongside or within fraud and risk functions; understanding of how fraud controls interact with product design

• Proven ability to manage multiple concurrent workstreams with different stakeholders and different cadences, without dropping the ball

• Track record of turning complex operational data into clear, actionable MI for product and leadership teams

• Structured thinker who's comfortable in the detail but can step back and see the bigger picture

• Strong communicator - able to translate between the worlds of compliance, risk, engineering, and product

• Experience with card issuing programmes (scheme rules, chargeback processes, fraud typologies)

• Familiarity with third party banking and payments vendors (e.g. BIN sponsors, scheme processors, TPP aggregators)

• Prior experience in a fast-scaling consumer fintech or neobank

• Exposure to crypto or digital assets products

Unless a specific application deadline is stated in the job posting, applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.

Please note, applicants are permitted to redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance at or graduation from an educational institution.

We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Payward is powered by people from around the world and we celebrate the diverse talents, backgrounds, contributions, and unique perspectives that everyone brings to the table. We hire based on merit, seeking out people with the right abilities, knowledge, and skills for the job. We encourage you to apply for roles where you don't fully meet the listed requirements, especially if you're passionate or knowledgeable about crypto.

We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments as part of our hiring process. These assessments evaluate competencies relevant to the role and are applied consistently across candidates for similar positions. Results are considered alongside experience and interviews, and are not the sole basis for any employment decision.

As an equal opportunity employer, we don't tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind, whether based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

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