- As Director of Compliance, you’ll own Compliance Strategy and Operations end-to-end: AML, sanctions, KYB/CDD, regulatory change, monitoring and testing, and the operational engine that runs it all

- You’ll own the compliance relationship with our sponsor bank — from day-to-day partnership through exams, audits, and new product approvals

- And you’ll build the team behind it, setting the standard for what “good” looks like as we grow

- This is a build role, not a maintain role
- The program you design becomes the thing that unlocks launch velocity with our banking partner, opens the door to banking-infrastructure optionality, and lets us bring products to market at the pace our customers need

- You’ll be building it with a Risk organization that is investing heavily in unified decision data, entity resolution, and agentic operations — which means your program can be evidence-driven and automated in ways that most compliance functions still only talk about

- At Relay, your work has real reach — helping millions of SMBs operate safely and confidently, while protecting the integrity of our banking partnerships and our license to operate

- If you want to build a modern compliance function from the ground up, with the mandate and the tooling to do it properly, this is the role for you

- Own the Compliance Program: Build and own Relay’s compliance program end-to-end — AML, sanctions, KYB/CDD, and regulatory compliance — including the policies, procedures, risk assessments, and controls that underpin it across every product and rail

- Program Governance: Be accountable for program effectiveness — investigations and suspicious activity governance, escalation paths, issue management through to validated remediation, and the internal standards that keep the program defensible

- Sponsor Bank Partnership: Own the compliance relationship with our sponsor bank — day-to-day partnership, exam and audit readiness, issue resolution, product approvals, and the management information package that demonstrates our control environment

- Build an Evidence Engine: Design the monitoring, testing, and reporting infrastructure that lets us prove control effectiveness with data rather than assertion — producing a complete, examination-grade customer risk picture in hours, not weeks

- Financial Crimes Strategy: Set the strategy for transaction monitoring, investigation, and suspicious activity reporting — designing detection that meets the highest regulatory standard while keeping legitimate customers moving

- Perpetual KYB & Customer Diligence: Move us from periodic review to continuous re-verification — ownership drift, entity status, industry change, adverse media — with a particular eye on synthetic business identity, the fastest-growing attack on SMB fintech

- Enable the Business: Partner with Product, Engineering, Risk, and Operations to embed compliance requirements into new products and features from the design stage, so compliance becomes a design input rather than a launch gate

- Regulatory Change Management: Track the regulatory landscape — FinCEN program effectiveness expectations,



Nacha fraud monitoring obligations, sanctions developments, post-Synapse sponsor oversight — and translate change into concrete updates to our controls and roadmap

- Build and Lead the Team: Hire, coach, and grow the Compliance pillar across both strategy and operations. Set the structure, the career paths, and the standard of work

- Scale Operations Without Scaling Headcount Linearly: Push AI and automation into compliance operations so agents assemble evidence, summarize, and draft while your team disposition, contain, and attest — capacity grows with volume, headcount grows with judgment

- Measure What Matters: Run the pillar on a paired scorecard — risk outcomes alongside customer friction — so we never buy compliance performance with unnecessary customer disruption, or vice versa

- Board and Leadership Reporting: Provide clear, periodic reporting to senior management and the board on program health, emerging risk, and issue remediation

Benefits

- Competitive salary and meaningful equity: Relay employees are Relay owners, complete with equity and a competitive salary. Since 2023, 66%+ of employees have received salary increases, with multiple new team members joining just last year.

- Social connection: We believe in celebrating our wins with two annual company-wide get-togethers, quarterly team events, happy hours, and special events and networking opportunities with industry leaders.

- Personal and professional growth: Through ongoing feedback, mentorship, and coaching, work with peers and leaders who are invested in your growth and success. Even with more than half of our team joining in the last 12 months, almost 20% have received promotions in the last year alone.

- Parental leave with top-up: We offer 12 weeks off with a 100% salary top-up for all full-time employees, regardless of location, and accessible for all parents: birthing, non-birthing, and adoptive

- Comprehensive health benefits: Enjoy full health benefits from day one: no probation period required.

We offer versatile Health or Wellness Spending Accounts and medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents.

- Hybrid work environment: We value meaningful collaboration and connection at our Toronto office three days per week, with lunch, snacks, and beverages on us.

- Top-tier equipment: As a Mac-first company, our Toronto offices have everything you need to produce your best work comfortably, from multiple screens to ergonomic seating.

- Flexible vacation and time off: Every team member starts with 15 vacation days and 5 flex days to use as needed, plus an extra week of office closure during the end-of-year holidays.

- Dog-friendly space: Can dogs really make you happy and healthy? We don’t know for sure, but since we don’t want to chance it,



our office is 100% floof-friendly.

- Award-winning workplace: As a winner of CB Insights’ Fintech 100, Deloitte Canada’s Technology Fast 50, Forbes Fintech 50, and the CIX Top 10 Growth Award, Relay is a recognized innovative and high-growth company.
- You’re a strong communicator across every altitude — a board deck, a bank exam response, an engineering ticket, and a hard conversation with a product leader

- You’re technically fluent enough to be dangerous — you can reason about how monitoring systems, decisioning platforms, and data pipelines actually work, and you can hold your own with Engineering on what needs to be logged and why

- You’ve owned a program’s effectiveness personally, and you understand the difference between a program that looks compliant and one that holds up under scrutiny

- You genuinely believe compliance enables growth. You’ve said no when it mattered, and more often you’ve found the path to yes that nobody else could see

- You’ve built compliance programs, policies, and control frameworks from the ground up — not just inherited and maintained them

- You’ve hired, coached, and grown compliance talent, and you’re energized by building a team’s standard rather than just its output

- You’re actively using AI tools in how you work today and you’re excited to push what’s possible with them

- You have 8+ years of compliance experience in fintech, banking, or payments, including time leading a compliance function or a major pillar of one

- You lead through data. You’re comfortable defining the metrics that prove a control works, and you’d rather show a regulator a dataset than a memo

- You’ve managed a sponsor bank, regulator, or examiner relationship directly, and you know that credibility is built between exams, not during them

- You thrive in fast-paced environments, tackling ambiguity, building process where none exists, and raising the bar across the team

- You have experience across multiple product types — deposits, cards, ACH, RDC, acquiring, or credit

- You have experience with charter applications, second sponsor bank diligence, or banking-as-a-service program structuring

- You have experience working in a fintech startup or scale-up

- You’ve joined a company at its early stages and have seen it through scale

- We’re looking for people who are relentless, curious, and care deeply about the work. You’re encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn’t perfectly match the — your perspective and drive matter more

- You’re familiar with compliance and financial crimes tooling like Unit21, Sardine, Alloy, Middesk, Hawk, or similar- Stage 1: A 45-minute Google Meet video call with a member of the Talent team

- Stage 2: A 45-minute Google Meet video call with the Head of Risk

- Stage 3: A take-home case study followed by a 60-minute Google Meet video call with our Risk leadership team

- Stage 4: A 45-minute Google Meet video call with a cross-functional partner (Product, Engineering, or Operations)

- Stage 5: A 45-minute in-person interview with a member of the Executive team

📌 Director of Compliance (Toronto)
🏢 Relay
📍 Toronto