Compliance Manager
Ziina
Legal, Sales & Business Development
Dubai - United Arab Emirates
Posted on Sep 3, 2025
The Role
We’re looking for a hands-on, solutions-oriented and technically strong Compliance Manager to join our team at Ziina. In this role, you’ll lead the operational implementation of our AML/CFT program, spanning AML, regulatory reporting, transaction monitoring, and policy development. You’ll work cross-functionally with teams across the business to ensure our processes align with regulatory requirements while enabling speed and innovation. This is a great opportunity for someone who thrives in fast-paced environments, brings strong operational discipline, and is excited to build and scale compliance foundations in a modern fintech setting.
As a Compliance Manager at Ziina, you will:
- Curate and manage Ziina’s compliance program, including policies, risk assessments, and internal controls tailored to fintech operations.
- Manage the STR/SAR process, ensuring timely, accurate reporting and strong documentation practices.
- Partner with Product, Engineering, and FinCrime Operation team to optimize transaction monitoring systems, reduce false positives, and maintain risk-based rules.
- Leverage data tools to analyze trends, automate workflows, and maintain high data integrity across compliance systems.
- Develop and maintain real-time dashboards that surface key compliance metrics, risks, and operational performance.
- Serve as the first point of contact for compliance-related BAU queries from internal teams (e.g., onboarding flows, beneficial ownership, activity reviews), escalating only material issues.
- Stay ahead of regulatory obligations across jurisdictions, ensuring our processes meet both local and international standards.
- Contribute to the preparation of regulatory submissions and internal audit/supervision readiness efforts alongside the Head of Compliance.
- As the function matures, progressively take ownership of second-line quality assurance including periodic testing .
To succeed in this role, you likely:
- Have 4+ years of experience in AML, Compliance, testing areas, , risk, in a fintech, payments, or financial institution—ideally with exposure to high-velocity transaction environments.
- Are deeply familiar with AML frameworks, suspicious activity indicators, and regional/international reporting standards.
- Are comfortable using data tools (e.g., SQL, Excel, Python) to perform investigative analysis and automate repetitive tasks.
- Can communicate compliance needs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Have experience collaborating with or guiding engineering teams in building internal compliance tools.
- Operate with a detail-oriented mindset and can manage competing priorities in a fast-moving, cross-functional environment.
- Have built or significantly contributed to an AML system from scratch.
What would amaze us:
- You’ve worked across jurisdictions and implemented scalable compliance frameworks across multiple regulators.
- You’ve built internal tooling or workflow automations that meaningfully reduced manual effort.
- You’ve designed dashboards or tooling that improved visibility into alerts, rule performance, or STR metrics.
- You’ve helped prepare for and/or respond to regulatory supervisions, reports and risk assessments.
- You’re known as someone who takes ownership, drives initiatives to the finish line, and delivers scalable compliance outcomes.
About Ziina
Ziina’s mission is to bring financial freedom to every person in the Middle East. We are building MENA’s consumer and SMB financial platform, starting with a peer-to-peer and merchant wallet. Our team have backgrounds from Apple, Uber, Stripe, Klarna, Revolut, Yandex, and Nubank. Ziina’s payments volumes have grown by 10x YoY for the last two years. The team have built a product that is beloved by the UAE and is the recipient of 8 international design awards, including the Red Dot Award and the UX Design Award. Our last round was a $22 million Series A from top-tier investors globally including Altos Ventures, Fintech Collective, Activant, Long Journey Ventures and Y Combinator. Our angel investors include early employees and executives at Revolut, Stripe, Venmo, Brex, Checkout.com, Notion, and Deel.
Join us in shaping the future of financial freedom. Every role here is an opportunity to make a real impact. Let’s build something that matters—together.