Sanctions Investigations Team Lead

About the Role:

Lead a team of sanctions and counter-terrorist-financing investigators responsible for identifying, investigating, and escalating sanctions exposure across the firm's global footprint. The role owns investigation quality, throughput, and consistency for the team, and acts as the escalation point for complex or high-risk matters while ensuring the investigative record stands up to regulatory and audit scrutiny.

What You’ll Do:

Investigation leadership and quality

• Own end-to-end investigation quality for the team: case scoping, evidence standards, narrative quality, disposition rationale, and closure documentation
• Act as escalation point and reviewer for complex, high-value, or politically exposed matters; make or endorse disposition recommendations
• Ensure every disposition is defensible against applicable sanctions regimes and internal standards, and is documented to withstand regulatory, audit, and independent review

Operational performance

• Manage intake, triage, and ageing across the team's queue; ensure matters are prioritised by risk and progressed within SLAs
• Own team capacity planning: allocation, coverage across time zones, and surge handling
• Track and report team throughput, cycle time, QA outcomes, and escalation volumes to senior management and governance forums
• Identify and drive process improvements that reduce false positives and manual effort without weakening controls

Regulatory and stakeholder engagement

• Represent the team in interactions with regulators, external auditors, and independent reviewers; own response quality and evidence packs
• Partner with Sanctions Advisory on interpretive questions and novel typologies, and with Technology on screening rule tuning, model changes, and tooling
• Escalate material or time-sensitive exposure to Financial Crime Compliance leadership and, where required, to the business and Legal
• Coordinate with law enforcement, industry bodies, and peer institutions where appropriate and approved

Team and capability

• Set clear performance expectations; manage, coach, and develop investigators, including career progression and succession coverage
• Build sanctions and CTF technical depth within the team: typologies, evasion techniques, digital-asset and cross-border payment risks
• Partner with Compliance Training on mandatory and role-specific training; ensure the team's knowledge stays current with evolving regimes and designations
• Drive adoption of investigative tooling and AI-assisted workflows, including validating output quality before scaling

Governance and control

• Maintain team SOP, investigation playbooks, and escalation protocols; keep them current and aligned to policy
• Ensure records, retention, and confidentiality standards are met, including for the most sensitive matters
• Support internal audit, risk assessment, and control-testing exercises; own remediation of team-level findings

What We’re Looking For:

• 7+ years of experience in sanctions investigations, CTF investigations, or financial crime investigations in a crypto or financial services environment
• Direct people leadership experience, including performance management, coaching, and career development of investigators
• Demonstrated ability to build SOPs, playbooks, and escalation protocols
• Experience with regulatory exams, external audits, or independent reviews, including owning the evidence pack and remediating findings
• Experience driving process improvement with measurable outcomes, reducing false positives or cycle time without weakening controls
• Hands-on experience with blockchain analytics tools: Chainalysis, Elliptic, TRM Labs, or equivalent
• Exposure to emerging evasion typologies and digital-asset risks, including mixers, chain hops, and nested VASPs
• Strong working knowledge of global sanctions frameworks (OFAC, UN, EU, UK) and CTF regulatory requirements
• Working knowledge of sanctions-specific reporting obligations beyond SARs/STRs, including blocking and rejected transaction reporting
• Proven ability to conduct complex, multi-source investigations and produce clear, defensible written outputs including SARs/STRs
• Experience with sanctions screening platforms
• Strong analytical and investigative skills, able to connect disparate data points and form well-reasoned conclusions
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, high-volume environment with competing priorities

Nice to Haves:

• Degree in Finance, Law, Criminal Justice, Computer Science, or a related field
• Experience managing third-party or BPO investigation capacity, including quality scorecards, sampling, and corrective action
• Experience designing or running a QC or QA programme, including sampling methodology and how scores translate into action