Senior Sanctions Compliance Specialist

We're Hiring: Senior Sanctions Compliance Specialist

Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

Employment Type: Full-Time

Experience Level: Senior

Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a globally focused organization committed to maintaining robust sanctions compliance, financial-crime controls, regulatory compliance, and responsible business practices across diverse markets.

Our teams collaborate across Compliance, Financial Crime, Legal, Risk, KYC, AML, Payments, Banking Operations, Trade, Technology, and senior management to identify, assess, investigate, and mitigate sanctions-related risks throughout the customer and transaction lifecycle.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Sanctions Compliance Specialist to lead and support sanctions screening, alert investigation, sanctions risk assessment, escalation, regulatory compliance, control testing, and sanctions-program enhancement.

The ideal candidate will provide senior-level expertise across customer and transaction screening, sanctions-list analysis, potential-match investigations, ownership and control assessments, sanctions licensing and regulatory requirements, false-positive disposition, sanctions governance, and ongoing monitoring.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop, implement, and maintain sanctions compliance policies, procedures, standards, controls, and operating guidelines.
• Support the organization's sanctions compliance framework across customers, transactions, products, services, and business activities.
• Monitor applicable sanctions requirements and translate regulatory developments into practical compliance controls.
• Conduct customer screening against applicable sanctions, watchlists, restricted-party lists, and other approved screening sources.
• Review transaction-screening alerts and determine whether potential matches require investigation or escalation.
• Investigate potential sanctions matches using customer information, transaction details, ownership data, geographic information, and reliable external sources.
• Distinguish true sanctions matches from false positives using documented and risk-based assessment criteria.
• Analyze names, aliases, dates of birth, nationalities, addresses, registration information, identifiers, and other relevant data points.
• Conduct detailed analysis of corporate ownership and control structures to identify potential sanctions exposure.
• Assess direct and indirect ownership, control, beneficial ownership, subsidiaries, affiliates, shareholders, directors, and related parties.
• Identify potential exposure to sanctioned individuals, entities, vessels, aircraft, organizations, jurisdictions, sectors, goods, or activities.
• Review complex and multi-jurisdictional transactions for sanctions-related risks.
• Investigate payment, trade, banking, investment, remittance, and other transactions that may present sanctions concerns.
• Assess geographic exposure associated with customers, counterparties, beneficiaries, originators, intermediaries, goods, services, and transaction routes.
• Escalate potential true matches and material sanctions concerns to senior Compliance, Legal, Financial Crime, Risk, or relevant governance functions.
• Support decisions regarding transaction holds, account restrictions, relationship escalation, rejection, blocking, or other control actions where appropriate.
• Maintain complete and accurate sanctions investigation records, evidence, decision rationale, approvals, and escalation documentation.
• Ensure sanctions cases are resolved within established service levels and regulatory requirements.
• Maintain appropriate controls over sensitive sanctions investigations and confidential regulatory information.
• Support sanctions-related licensing, authorization, exemption, and regulatory filing processes where applicable.
• Coordinate with Legal and Compliance teams on sanctions licenses, exemptions, regulatory interpretations, and complex sanctions questions.
• Monitor sanctions regimes, regulatory updates, enforcement actions, advisories, and published guidance from relevant authorities.
• Assess the impact of new or amended sanctions requirements on customers, products, markets, payment channels, counterparties, and business operations.
• Support implementation of sanctions-list updates and ensure screening systems are updated accurately and promptly.
• Validate sanctions-screening data, list ingestion, matching logic, thresholds, and system configuration.
• Review sanctions-screening scenarios and recommend improvements to matching rules, thresholds, filters, and alert-generation logic.
• Support sanctions-screening system tuning to improve detection effectiveness while managing unnecessary alerts.
• Conduct periodic reviews of sanctions controls, screening coverage, alert logic, and operational effectiveness.
• Support sanctions risk assessments across products, services, customer segments, jurisdictions, channels, and business activities.
• Identify emerging sanctions risks associated with geopolitical developments, new restrictions, evasion techniques, intermediaries, and complex transaction structures.
• Assess potential sanctions-evasion indicators, including unusual routing, intermediary structures, ownership changes, trade patterns, and transaction behavior.
• Coordinate with AML, KYC, Transaction Monitoring, Fraud, Trade Compliance, Legal, and Risk teams on overlapping financial-crime risks.
• Review customer due-diligence information where sanctions concerns require additional verification or enhanced assessment.
• Support enhanced due-diligence reviews for customers or counterparties presenting elevated sanctions risk.
• Conduct sanctions-related adverse-media and open-source research where required.
• Support investigations involving sanctions evasion, circumvention, prohibited counterparties, restricted jurisdictions, or suspicious transaction structures.
• Prepare clear investigation summaries and recommendations for senior management and sanctions governance committees.
• Conduct quality assurance reviews of sanctions alerts, investigations, dispositions, and escalation decisions.
• Identify control weaknesses, recurring screening issues, data-quality problems, and inconsistent investigation practices.
• Develop corrective and preventive actions and track remediation through completion.
• Support internal audits, external audits, regulatory examinations, sanctions compliance testing, and control assessments.
• Prepare evidence, case files, reports, and documentation requested by auditors, regulators, and internal control functions.
• Develop sanctions management information and dashboards covering alert volumes, match rates, false positives, escalations, investigations, case aging, and control performance.
• Monitor sanctions alert queues, investigation backlogs, aging, service levels, and outstanding actions.
• Analyze sanctions trends and identify recurring risk patterns and operational weaknesses.
• Support sanctions training and awareness programs for Compliance, Operations, Payments, Trade, Banking, Customer Service, and other relevant teams.
• Provide subject-matter guidance to analysts and operational teams handling complex sanctions cases.
• Review complex sanctions investigations prepared by junior analysts and provide technical guidance and quality feedback.

Key Performance Indicators

• Sanctions screening accuracy
• Screening coverage
• Alert generation effectiveness
• Alert investigation completion rate
• Alert turnaround time
• Sanctions case aging
• Investigation backlog
• False-positive rate
• True-positive identification rate
• Potential-match escalation accuracy
• Sanctions case documentation quality
• Investigation quality-assurance score
• Sanctions decision accuracy
• Screening-list update timeliness
• Sanctions-list data accuracy
• Screening-system availability
• Screening-rule effectiveness
• Screening threshold optimization
• High-risk sanctions review completion
• Enhanced sanctions due-diligence completion
• Sanctions-risk assessment completion
• Geographic sanctions-risk assessment quality
• Ownership and control analysis accuracy
• Sanctions-evasion identification rate
• Transaction-screening effectiveness
• Customer-screening effectiveness
• Payment-screening accuracy
• Trade-screening effectiveness
• Sanctions escalation timeliness
• Transaction hold or restriction response time
• Regulatory reporting timeliness
• Regulatory reporting quality
• Sanctions licensing and exemption management
• Regulatory-change implementation
• Sanctions control effectiveness
• Compliance-testing completion
• Audit finding resolution
• Regulatory examination readiness
• Remediation completion rate
• Data-quality issue resolution
• Training completion
• Analyst competency and quality
• Management reporting timeliness
• Sanctions technology effectiveness
• Automation effectiveness
• Sanctions-risk reduction

Ideal Candidate

The successful candidate should have strong experience in sanctions compliance, sanctions screening, financial-crime compliance, AML, KYC, transaction monitoring, regulatory compliance, or sanctions investigations, preferably within banking, payments, fintech, investment services, trade finance, insurance, or another regulated financial environment.

The candidate should demonstrate:

• Strong knowledge of international sanctions frameworks and sanctions compliance principles.
• Proven experience conducting customer and transaction sanctions-screening investigations.
• Strong understanding of sanctions-list structures, restricted parties, designated persons, and jurisdictional restrictions.