Lead Analyst, Financial Crimes

About the role

Chime's Financial Crimes team protects millions of members from money laundering, fraud, and the organized networks that target consumer financial platforms. We work in a bank-partner model: we run detection and investigation, and we escalate unusual activity to our bank partners, who hold the filing obligation. That means our written work product is read by outside parties, and the quality bar is correspondingly high.

This is a senior individual contributor role. You will set the standard for how financial crime work is done here rather than working a queue — defining what good looks like, raising the ceiling for the analysts you lead, and owning the hardest problems on the team end to end.

The base salary offered for this role and level of experience will begin at $139,000.00 and up to $193,000.00. Full-time employees are also eligible for a bonus, competitive equity package, and benefits. The actual base salary offered may be higher, depending on your location, skills, qualifications, and experience.

In this role, you can expect to:

• Operate with minimal direction on problems that arrive ambiguous, and you define the approach rather than waiting for one.
• Set the quality standard others calibrate to with defensible judgement calls.
• Move work across team boundaries without formal authority, and you are trusted to represent Financial Crimes to partners outside the function.
• Raise the ceiling of the people around you — through calibration, coaching, documentation, and the examples you set in your own casework.
• Improve the system, not just the case. Every hard investigation should leave behind something reusable: a control, a procedure, a detection change, or a documented typology.
• What you will own:
  • Vendor Management. You will lead, and support, a team of analysts.
  • Vendor team quality. You sample operations work, run calibration with partners, keep apprised of quality assurance trends, and hold quality and productivity expectations where they belong.
  • Risk trend analysis. You understand AML and Fraud risks well enough to follow the pattern of unusual activity across accounts, devices, funding sources, counterparties, and behavioral patterns, and you can show the shape of a network in a way a non-investigator understands.
  • Typology development. You document new and evolving schemes, make them teachable to the wider team, identify if opportunities in coverage are needed, and own the creation of coverage with partners as appropriate.
  • Operational rollout of new coverage. When a new typology or scenario goes live, you design how it will be worked — routing, procedure, evidence standard, and quality checks — before the first alert lands.
  • Procedures and documentation. You own the SOPs for your area and keep them in a state where a third party could read them cold and understand what we do and why.
  • Audit and exam readiness. You prepare the operational side for internal audit, independent testing, and bank partner reviews, and you own remediation of findings assigned to operations through to closure.

To thrive in this role, you have:

• 7+ years in financial crime, fraud, or risk investigations at a bank, fintech, payments company, or comparable regulated environment.
• Working command of BSA, the USA PATRIOT Act, OFAC requirements, and unusual/suspicious activity reporting standards — enough to explain not just the rule but why it exists.
• Deep experience across the transaction monitoring alert lifecycle at real volume, including the operational tradeoffs that come with it.
• Real typology depth across both money laundering and fraud — mule and money movement networks, first-party fraud, synthetic and stolen identity, scams and social engineering, elder financial exploitation, etc.
• Hands-on involvement in scenario tuning or threshold work alongside data or risk partners, with an understanding of what changing a threshold actually costs.
• Experience overseeing vendor or outsourced investigation teams.
• Judgment under volume. You can distinguish the case that deserves forty hours from the one that deserves forty minutes.  
• Comfort with sustained ambiguity. You will spend real time on hypotheses that do not pan out, and you need the judgment to know when to stop.
• Advanced SQL, and fluency with graph or link analysis tooling for mapping relationships at scale.
• CAMS, CFE, or equivalent certification preferred.

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