Fincrime Operations Lead

Few people get to build a bank from scratch. Even fewer get to build one at a moment when banking itself is being reinvented.

The dollar is the best product in the history of the world, with practically infinite global demand, but distribution is broken. Global clearing runs on legacy banks that are closed 115 days a year, built for humans and take two days to settle. Augustus is the update to the internet era. We received conditional approval from the OCC to charter America’s first stablecoin-native clearing bank that is always open, made for machines, at the speed of compute.

We are a group of operators, unicorn early employees, ex-founders and people who walked away from degrees because they believe this is an industry and career defining opportunity. We're backed with $40M from Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, Creandum and founders of Ramp, Deel and Circle.

We are regulated in Europe and live with Euro and Stablecoin clearing today. Now, we are building the US team from the ground up, while continuing to grow rapidly in Europe.

As Fincrime Operations Lead at Augustus, you build the machine that runs our BSA/AML monitoring program. Compliance writes the specs - the rules, the risk appetite, the policies. You build the system that executes them. Automating decisions and engaging humans only for the highest risk or knife-edge decisions.

Your mission: take it from spec to production. You're building infrastructure - decisioning rules, automated investigation flows, agent-run case handling, and audit trails by default. Transaction monitoring, sanctions, and SAR pipelines - all of it becomes code you author, deploy, and version.

We're building the dark bank - a bank that runs mostly autonomously, where operations are designed so the work doesn't emerge in the first place. Fincrime Ops is the sharpest expression of that thesis: legacy banks throw seas of analysts at queues. We design queues that shrink. Every alert you automate correctly is a flow that becomes machine-runnable. Every alert you patch with headcount is a flow that compounds the wrong way. It’s ultimately your goal that headcount does not scale with transaction volume.

You work across Operations, Product, and Compliance to shape how the bank handles risk in practice. You partner with the BSA Officer and CCO daily - they write the requirements, you build the machine. You are trusted with every decision you make.

In your first 6 months, you'll own the refinement and build out of Augustus' BSA/AML engine - a complete, documented system for how the bank detects, investigates, and dispositions risk at every stage from alert to filing. Tooling, SOPs, ownership, escalation paths, decisioning rules - and the agents that run them.

• Month 1–2: You get into the stack. You understand exactly how money moves through our infrastructure, where the current compliance controls sit, and where the gaps are. You build a clear picture of what needs to be automated, what needs to be replaced, and what can wait.

• Month 3–4: Ship the first wave of automations. Prove out the operating model on a live cohort. Drive measurable case-handling lift.

• Month 5–6: Automation lives across the alert lifecycle. Optimize skills and human in the loop processes to start scaling.

We believe that throwing smart people with high agency at big problems produces the best outcomes. The people who succeed here share the following traits:

• Relentless: You can't leave something broken. You don't stop because it got hard or because no one is watching.

• Set The Bar: You're harder on yourself than anyone else would be. You don't need external accountability to care about quality.

• Shape The Game: You don't wait for a playbook and you don't need one. You walk into genuinely new territory and figure it out. You move before anyone asked you to.

• Systems First: You don't solve problems by adding people or effort. You build systems that make the problem smaller. Your first instinct is to automate, not to handle it manually.

This job is for you, if

• You reach for code before a queue. When you see an alert pattern, your first instinct is "what rule or model should have decisioned this?" — not "we need more analysts."

• You want to build the BSA/AML engine, not staff one. Compliance writes the specs. You translate them into decisioning logic, investigation flows, and agents that run cases. If you've watched fincrime programs scale linearly with volume and thought this is solvable, this is the job where you solve it.

• You can sit between Compliance and Engineering and speak both languages. You take a CCO's risk appetite and turn it into something a system can execute, with audit trails by default. Neither side has to translate for you.

• You want to ship into production, not write memos about shipping. Transaction monitoring, sanctions, SAR pipelines — these become code you author, deploy, and version. If you've been the person whose best ideas died in a vendor procurement cycle, you'll appreciate that here you build them.

• You want decisions that are actually yours. You report to the COO, partner daily with the BSA Officer and CCO, and own the machine end-to-end. This suits someone who's hit the ceiling of executing other people's compliance roadmaps.

This job is not for you, if

• You measure your impact by the size of your team. Success here looks like alert volume going up while headcount stays flat. A growing analyst org is the failure mode, not the goal.

• You prefer a mature program to a blank page. No Actimize tuned over five years, no investigations playbook to inherit, no QA team standing by. You'll be designing the system, not optimizing within one.

• You see Compliance as a constraint to work around. The BSA Officer and CCO are your closest partners and they own the requirements. If "Compliance said no" is a phrase you've used with frustration rather than respect, the partnership won't work.

• You want to spend most of your time on cases. You'll know the alert landscape intimately, but the bulk of your week is building decisioning logic, specifying agents, and shaping infrastructure with Product and Engineering.

• "Operations designed so the work doesn't emerge" sounds like a marketing line to you. The dark bank thesis shapes every decision. Skepticism that fincrime ops can run this way means rowing against the current daily.

• 3+ years in a fast-paced environment.

• Building products or processes at a bank, fintech, payments, or crypto company, or a tier 1 consulting background with regulated financial services exposure.

• AI native.

Compensation packages at Augustus include base salary, equity, and benefits. New hire offers are made based on a candidate's experience, expertise and geographic location. The annual US base salary range for this role is $150,000-$180,000 + equity.

• Career Growth: You will be given more responsibility and pushed to grow faster than ever before.

• Network: Your peers are brilliant, highly motivated people. These people will be foundational in your future opportunities.

• Real Participation: Employees are shareholders. You will think and act like an owner.

• Perks & Benefits: Relocation support, visa support, the latest Apple gear (MacBook + AirPods), lunch benefit, gym benefit, a beautiful office in the heart of the city, 4x on-/offsites per year, and an annual development budget.

• Health & Insurance: Our US team receives comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance plans. We are offering 401(k) retirement plans.

Augustus is committed to creating an inclusive environment where people from all backgrounds can thrive and where different viewpoints and experiences are valued and respected. Augustus will consider all applications for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, national origin, religious beliefs, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, neurodiversity, disability, age, parental or veteran status.