Compliance & Risk Lead (Maternity Cover)

What do we do? Paddle offers digital product companies a completely different approach to their payment infrastructure. Instead of assembling and maintaining a complex stack of payments-related apps and services, we’re a Merchant of Record for our customers. That means we take away 100% of the pain of payment fragmentation. It’s faster, safer, cheaper, and, above all, way better. We’re backed by investors including KKR, FTV Capital, Kindred, Notion, and 83North and serve over 10,000 software sellers in 300 territories globally. The Role: As Compliance & Risk Lead, you are a key member of Paddle’s compliance team, reporting to our VP, Compliance. You work closely with legal, product, and operational teams to ensure Paddle remains compliant with global payments and fintech regulations as we scale rapidly. The Paddle compliance function is critical to our operations and growth, enabling innovation while maintaining trust with customers and regulators. You lead the compliance team and collaborate across teams, bringing expertise in payments compliance, risk management, and reporting. You are instrumental in building robust systems to track, analyze, and report on compliance, ensuring Paddle stays ahead in a dynamic regulatory landscape. The role is based in the UK but global in scope, reflecting Paddle’s international reach. What you'll do: You will partner with our Compliance, legal and other teams across Paddle to integrate compliance into our operations, with a heightened focus on building scalable monitoring and reporting: • Team leadership: Hire, onboard, and manage compliance professionals, fostering a collaborative and high-performing team to support Paddle’s global compliance needs. • Payments compliance: Develop and refine compliance policies and procedures to ensure adherence to global card scheme rules, consumer protection laws and payments regulation (as applicable). • Compliance monitoring: Design and oversee simple tech-enabled monitoring programs to track compliance with internal policies and external regulations, using data-driven tools to identify trends and potential risks proactively. • Reporting: Deliver compliance reporting for internal stakeholders at all levels (e.g. senior leadership, the Board, product teams) and external regulators, ensuring accuracy, timeliness, and clarity to demonstrate Paddle’s regulatory adherence. • Risk management: Develop and manage Paddle’s enterprise risk management program, collaborating with teams across the business to identify risks, embed controls and report on their effectiveness. • Regulatory research: Work with the legal team to stay ahead of evolving payments, consumer and fintech regulations, advising on their impact and integrating findings into monitoring and reporting frameworks. • Incident response: Lead investigations into high-risk complaints and/or compliance breaches, coordinating with legal and operational teams to resolve issues, and produce detailed incident reports for internal review and regulatory submission as needed. We'd love to hear from you: • You have 6-8 years of compliance experience, ideally in payments and/or in fast-growing businesses, with a proven ability to implement and manage scalable monitoring and reporting systems. • You have deep expertise in data protection, card scheme rules and payments regulation (e.g., PSD2, AML/KYC) and hands-on experience in fintech or SaaS environments. • You’ve worked in a high-growth scale-up, building compliance frameworks that emphasize real-time monitoring and detailed reporting to support rapid expansion. • You’re an exceptional communicator, able to distill compliance data into concise, actionable insights for diverse audiences—from engineers to regulators. • You thrive in a fast-paced environme