About the role
Lightspark is building the open payment protocol for the Internet making money move like data: instantly, globally, and without friction. With enterprise tools like Grid, Node, and Spark, businesses can send and receive money instantly, securely, and at a fraction of the cost, anytime, anywhere. Lightspark is headquartered in Los Angeles, California, but serves the world. This role will own the design and buildout of our Financial Crimes function from the ground up — establishing the investigative framework, operational infrastructure, and team needed to support Lightspark's growth across a diverse and complex payments landscape. The compliance surface here is broad: multi-asset flows spanning fiat, stablecoins, and Bitcoin; high-volume cross-border corridors; crypto on- and off-ramps; and a fast-growing roster of institutional partners. Reporting to the Chief Compliance Officer, you will set the strategic direction for AML, sanctions, and fraud investigations while remaining hands-on during our early stage, and will be central to shaping how Lightspark scales its compliance function responsibly. Regular travel to Los Angeles is required to collaborate with your team and cross-functional stakeholders. What you will be doing Build and lead the Financial Crimes function — design the program, operating model, workflows, policies, and procedures for AML and fraud investigations from scratch, with an eye toward scalability. Develop and own the investigations program — establish case management processes, escalation frameworks, and quality standards for investigations into money laundering, fraud, terrorist financing, elder abuse, and other illicit activity. Drive strategic improvements to transaction monitoring — move beyond reactive rule-tuning to proactively identify gaps, propose new typologies specific to crypto and cross-border payment flows, and work cross-functionally with product and engineering to improve detection capabilities. Ensure regulatory excellence — oversee the timely and thorough filing of Suspicious Activity Reports with FinCEN, and maintain accountability for the program's overall compliance posture across domestic and international jurisdictions. Build a Quality Assurance function that ensures SLAs applicable to alert review, case investigation and SAR filing are met and that decisioning in every critical step is consistent and defensible across the investigators. Build a forward-looking vendor and tooling strategy — evaluate, select, and manage third-party fraud and AML vendors and actively explore how emerging AI and machine learning tools can augment detection, investigation, and reporting workflows; you're not just procuring software, you're designing a tech-forward financial crimes stack. Operate efficiently at scale — find creative ways to punch above your weight with a lean team, using automation, AI-assisted triage, and smart process design to maximize coverage without sacrificing quality. Hire and mentor investigators — as the function grows, recruit, onboard, and develop junior investigators and analysts, building a high-performing team. Serve as a key cross-functional partner — work closely with Legal, Product, Engineering, and Customer Operations to embed financial crimes risk considerations into product decisions and operational processes. Serve as the primary point of contact for regulators and examiners on financial crimes matters — managing exam requests, responding to inquiries, and maintaining strong relationships with FinCEN and other relevant authorities.