Head of Assurance (Financial Crime Focus) at Griffin

About Griffin: Griffin is a fully regulated UK bank powering accounts and payments for fintechs and platforms like Uber, Yonder, Prosper, and Sidekick. Since launching in 2024, Griffin has rapidly grown to support products in remittance, payroll, wealth, insurance, proptech, payments, neobanking, and more. Griffin is expanding into card issuing, stablecoin infrastructure, and agentic finance.

Griffin operates in a high-trust, high-autonomy environment, remote-first since 2017, with asynchronous and fully flexible work arrangements. The company prioritizes hiring individuals who align with its core values, even if they lack all qualifications.

The Opportunity: Griffin is building its assurance team from the ground up, with a focus on financial crime. The role involves:

• Delivering independent assurance reviews, thematic deep dives, and control testing across the business, with a focus on financial crime.
• Managing the financial crime scope within the assurance plan, agreeing priorities directly with the MLRO, and managing other assurance scope as directed by the Head of Assurance.
• Embedding a combined assurance approach with Compliance, Risk, FinCrime, and Internal Audit.
• Setting the evidence bar for remediation, ensuring fixes hold rather than just appearing closed on paper.
• Maintaining an actions tracker and keeping the backlog moving.
• Producing assurance workpapers and reports that stand up to scrutiny and representing the Head of Assurance at governance committees.
• Helping mature the testing methodology, templates, and tooling as the function grows.

Within 6 months, you'll have delivered three to four assurance reviews end-to-end with no material quality concerns. By 12 months, you'll have measurably grown assurance capacity, reducing overdue actions and ensuring coverage holds as Griffin scales.

What Success Looks Like: You will shape this role by defining how outcomes are achieved, where energy is focused, and how the role evolves as you learn about Griffin's risk and control gaps.

Your Background: Griffin is looking for candidates with:

• Assurance, audit, or QC experience including testing controls, not just reviewing against a checklist.
• Financial crime experience as a reviewer, process owner, consultant, or within a prior assurance role, plus solid knowledge of the UK regulatory framework (POCA, SAR obligations, FCA/PRA expectations).
• A track record of raising uncomfortable findings when warranted and standing behind them unless new evidence says otherwise.
• Experience working in a regulated financial services environment.
• The judgment to hold challenging conversations with first-line teams without damaging relationships and the coordination skills to keep a combined assurance model working smoothly.
• A love of writing, given the extensive documentation involved, with a high degree of importance placed on clarity and readability.

Ideally, you would also: Hold a relevant qualification (ICA financial crime, CAMS, or IIA), or bring model validation, prudential risk, or tech assurance experience.

What Griffin Offers:

• Salary: up to £60,000
• Remote-first flexibility: Work from anywhere in the UK
• Work from abroad: Up to 20 days a year
• Time off: 25 days holiday, bank holidays, and a winter break
• Share options: Own a part of what Griffin is building together
• Pension: Auto-enrolment into the Penfold scheme
• Insurance: Private medical with Bupa (including family cover) and life insurance with AIG
• Wellbeing: 1:1 coaching and therapy sessions available through Oliva
• Family leave: Enhanced parental leave with up to 6 months on full pay after two years' service
• AI tools: Everyone has a Claude subscription and access to other premium tools
• Support for creating a comfortable and effective work-from-home environment

Interview Process: Griffin typically runs a six-stage interview process:

1. Talent screen
2. Technical interview with the hiring manager
3. Task
4. Peer interview
5. Culture interview
6. Founders chat

The entire process takes around 2-3 weeks from start to finish.

Remote-First: Griffin trusts people to do great work wherever they are. Most of the team works remotely full-time, with a small London office in Moorgate for those who prefer it. There is no expectation to be in the office.

Underrepresentation: Griffin is committed to creating a place where everyone belongs and welcomes diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and people ready to build a global platform for programmable finance.