Senior Financial Crime Officer

Pleo is a modern spend management platform helping businesses control, automate, and understand company spending while delivering great experiences to customers and colleagues.

We are seeking a Senior Financial Crime Officer to be the bridge between regulatory expectation and practical execution, defining and documenting auditable risk controls that require close partnership with Product, Engineering, and our 2nd Line of Defence.

Do you thrive on translating complex financial crime risks and regulatory guidance into clear, scalable control frameworks, partnering cross-functionally with teams like Product and Engineering to embed them without direct people management? Keep reading!

What you’ll do:

• Design, implement, and maintain financial crime prevention strategies and control frameworks for the 1st Line of defence
• Project manage implementation of changes to current processes and innovative ways of working
• Own and iterate libraries of standards and procedures to ensure clarity, usability, and audit readiness across markets
• Translate case and alert insights into improvements, partnering with product and engineering team to identify and monitor risks
• Perform root‑cause analyses on incidents and alerts; drive remediation actions and preventive controls end‑to‑end
• Horizon‑scan emerging threats, typologies, and regulatory changes across AML, CTF, sanctions, trade-based money laundering and fraud; brief stakeholders and adapt frameworks accordingly
• Build high‑quality MI and alert functions reporting to track control effectiveness and support governance forums and partners
• Collaborate with 2LoD on assurance, testing, and risk assessments; address findings with pragmatic remediation plans
• Contribute to vendor evaluations and model/rules governance, including change proposals, testing, and post‑implementation reviews
• Complete and govern FC questionnaires from 3rd parties to continue compliance, maintaining a good relationship with our external stakeholders.
• Coach and support colleagues across Framework and adjacent teams; champion high documentation standards and knowledge sharing

What you'll bring:

• Proven experience designing and delivering Fincrime frameworks in fintech, payments, or financial services
• Experience of change management/ project management at pace
• Deep knowledge of fincrime risks, typologies, and controls.
• Strong analytical skills and comfort working hands‑on with data to derive insights and shape rules, thresholds, and models
• Excellent written communication and documentation craft; able to make complex topics simple, actionable and auditable
• Skilled stakeholder manager who can prioritise, negotiate trade‑offs, and influence outcomes in a fast‑moving environment
• Track record of improving operational processes and embedding continuous improvement
• Strongly values customer experience and business enablement while upholding robust risk management

What is nice to have: 

• Experience in 2nd Line or Audit functions is a plus
• Project/change management qualification e.g. PRINCE2
• Financial crime certifications e.g. ACAMs, ICA
• Experience with Data and analytics tools, e.g. Looker, BigQuery, writing SQL queries
• Background in risk measurement and MI design for control effectiveness
• Exposure to sanctions, proliferation financing, and EDD assessments

Show me the benefits!

• Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)
• Lunch is on us - with catering in our Lisbon, Copenhagen and London offices or a monthly lunch allowance paid directly together with  your salary in other markets 🍜
• Private health insurance to ensure you’re fit in body and mind to do your best work
• We offer 25 days of holiday + your public holidays
• For our teams we offer remote working options
• Option to purchase 5 additional days of holiday through a salary sacrifice
• We’re trialling MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and wellbeing support with great success so far  ❤️‍🩹
• Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that we're supportive of families and help you feel that you don't have to compromise your family due to work 👶

Why join us?

Working at Pleo means you're working on something very exciting: the future of work. Our mission is to help every company go beyond the books. Pleo itself means ‘more than you’d expect’, and it’s been the secret to our success over the last 8 years. So it’s only fitting that we’d pass this philosophy onto our customers to help them make the most of their finances.

We think company spending should be delegated to all employees a