Senior Financial Crime Investigator

About the role

Klarna operates as a licensed bank, and every transaction that moves through the platform is a potential financial crime signal. You'll join Klarna's Financial Crime Intelligence team, an in-house group handling everything from routine reviews to the most complex, high-risk investigations in fintech. Whether your background is in fast-moving fintech, the regulatory rigor of traditional banking, or investigative work in law enforcement, you'll bring that experience to bear on real, high-stakes cases and the calls you make will reshape how Klarna detects and prevents financial crime at scale.

This isn't a position where your best work gets buried in a closed case file. You'll be expected to change the system, not just clear the queue: closing a coverage gap nobody else had seen, writing a SAR that changes how a typology gets monitored, or turning a single messy case into an insight that protects thousands of others.

Responsibilities

• Complex investigations — own the cases too nuanced, layered, or novel for standard processes to resolve, and document why, helping the team build a shared understanding of where the remit begins and ends.
• Intelligence — spot emerging typologies, translate signals into actionable insight, and help the team stay ahead of new fraud and financial crime patterns rather than just reacting to them.
• Enforcement — turn that intelligence into action: influencing transaction monitoring configuration, closing coverage gaps, and ensuring what investigations uncover actually changes the detection infrastructure, not just the individual case outcome.
• Help build and refine Klarna's broader Financial Crime framework — shaping policy, process, and documentation to meet regulatory requirements while staying ahead of emerging risks — and work closely with internal stakeholders to maintain strong investigative controls, support transaction monitoring quality, and ensure the framework scales responsibly as Klarna continues to grow across global markets.
• Depending on your background, this may also include mentoring and upskilling more junior investigators, contributing to quality calibration across the team, and representing Financial Crime in cross-functional forums where investigative judgement needs a seat at the table.

Requirements

• You've built real depth in AML or financial crime investigations within fintech, banking, payments, or a regulatory/investigative body, or as an investigator in law enforcement — candidates coming from a law enforcement investigative background, or with experience across both fintech and traditional banking, are especially encouraged to apply.
• A track record of real, demonstrable impact: cases you've resolved, gaps you've closed, or frameworks you've shaped that changed outcomes beyond a single case.
• Strong hands-on experience conducting end-to-end transaction monitoring, event-driven investigations, and complex case escalations.
• Proven ability to assess suspicious activity and draft clear, well-supported Suspicious Activity Reports in line with regulatory expectations.
• Solid understanding of AML and financial crime regulations applicable to the US and/or EU, including sanctions and PEP frameworks, and EU AML Directives/MLRO responsibilities.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and complex judgement calls — high-risk cases rarely come with a clean playbook, and you're willing to make and defend a reasoned call rather than waiting for certainty.
• You think beyond the case in front of you — spotting connections, patterns, and systemic gaps a narrower investigation would miss, and you share what you find rather than leaving it in your own case notes.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English, with the ability to document and explain investigative decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfort operating in a fast-paced environment with evolving financial crime risks and shifting operational priorities.
• A bias toward influence, not just execution — you'd rather fix the rule than keep catching the same exception by hand.
• Comfort working with transaction monitoring or screening systems at a level where you can meaningfully inform tuning, testing, or rule design — not just work the alerts they generate.
• An analytical mindset, comfortable working with large datasets to spot patterns; familiarity with SQL is a plus.

Qualifications

• Awesome to have CAMS, ICA, or equivalent AML certification.
• A university degree in Finance, Law, Business, Criminology, Criminal Justice, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience (including law enforcement or investigative service).
• Experience supporting or overseeing outsourced investigation or transaction monitoring teams.
• Exposure to a range of product types — from traditional banking products (lending, deposits, credit) to emerging products like crypto and investments — and/or AML regulatory reporting experience in the EU/UK.
• Additional languages (German, Swedish, and/or French).
• Genuine enthusiasm for AI-powered tooling in an investigative or compliance context — comfort adopting new tools and using AI-assisted analysis (e.g., case triage, summarization, pattern/typology detection) to work smarter across case volumes.
• A specific example of impact you're proud of — a case, a rule change, a gap you closed — that we can dig into together in conversation.

Please include a CV in English.