Compliance Operations Specialist
Block, Inc. is a technology company building tools for economic empowerment, operating a portfolio of financial brands including Square, Cash App, Afterpay, TIDAL, Bitkey, and Proto. It serves sellers, consumers, artists, and bitcoin users through payments, banking, buy-now-pay-later, music streaming, and bitcoin self-custody and mining products.
About Block, Inc.
Block, Inc. builds technology aimed at increasing access to the global economy. Its brands each unlock different aspects of the economy: Square makes commerce and financial services accessible to sellers; Cash App is an easy way to spend, send, and store money; Afterpay (Clearpay in the UK) helps customers manage spending over time; TIDAL is a music platform empowering artists as entrepreneurs; Bitkey is a self-custody bitcoin wallet; and Proto builds open, accessible bitcoin mining hardware and services. Block has been a long-time advocate for bitcoin, integrating bitcoin buying/selling and Lightning Network payments into Cash App and Square, funding open-source bitcoin infrastructure through Spiral (including the Lightning Development Kit), and engaging in bitcoin policy advocacy through groups like COPA, the Digital Energy Council, the Crypto Council for Innovation, and the Texas Blockchain Council. The company also runs a significant open source program (contributing to projects like Goose, an on-machine AI developer agent, OkHttp, Retrofit, gRPC, Envoy, and MySQL) and an AI research effort, including co-founding the Agentic AI Foundation with Anthropic and OpenAI. Block serves individual consumers, small and medium-sized businesses/merchants, artists, and developers.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
Conduct investigations into AML, fraud, sanctions, and other violations; monitor merchant activity; perform onboarding and ongoing due diligence reviews; document findings; make risk-based recommendations; and coordinate with payment networks and banking partners. The role requires communication with merchants and stakeholders in Japanese and English and is fully remote based in Japan only.
Requirements
- Professional fluency in Japanese and English, written and spoken.
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent professional experience.
- At least 3 years of experience in compliance operations, transaction monitoring, AML investigations, fraud investigations, risk management, or policy implementation in a regulated financial services environment.
- Strong understanding of Japanese financial crime compliance requirements, including CDD, KYC, transaction monitoring, and suspicious activity investigations.
- Knowledge of Japanese payment industry regulations, merchant acquiring requirements, and payment network rules.
- Strong investigative, transaction analysis, judgment, risk assessment, written communication, and case documentation skills.
- Based in Japan.
Responsibilities
- Monitor and investigate compliance-related alerts from transaction monitoring systems and manual reviews.
- Analyze merchant activity, payment flows, customer relationships, and operations to identify unusual or suspicious behavior.
- Investigate AML, fraud, sanctions, prohibited activities, financial crime risks, and policy violations.
- Verify merchant information and conduct onboarding and ongoing due diligence reviews.
- Document investigative findings and make risk-based recommendations regarding account actions and escalations.
- Conduct public record research and open-source intelligence reviews.
- Interact with merchants in Japanese and English to obtain information and communicate compliance requirements.
- Complete operational reviews and investigations within established service-level agreements.
- Coordinate with payment network partners, banking partners, and other stakeholders on compliance monitoring activities.
Benefits
- Remote work
- Medical insurance
- Flexible time off
- Retirement savings plans
- Modern family planning