Compliance Operations Associate - São Paulo (Hybrid)

About the role

Clara, a Latin American payments platform, is looking for a hands-on Compliance Operations Analyst in São Paulo to join its Legal & Compliance team and report to the Head of Legal & Compliance. The role supports customer onboarding, ongoing reviews and the operational AML/CFT agenda across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, managing high-volume casework while improving controls, workflows and automation.

Key responsibilities

• Review onboarding, remediation and reassessment cases for customers in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.
• Analyze corporate documents, ownership structures, UBOs, business models and the consistency of customer information.
• Perform KYC/KYB and enhanced due diligence, including PEP, sanctions and adverse-media screening, and document the rationale for each conclusion.
• Run ongoing transaction monitoring and review AML/CFT alerts from initial assessment through documented closure or escalation.
• Investigate suspicious activity, request additional information, conduct enhanced reviews and escalate cases in line with governance.
• Support operational AML/CFT activities such as periodic and event-driven reviews, customer-risk classification, control execution, remediation and regulatory reporting inputs.
• Apply the KYC Manual, AML/CFT policies, risk criteria, checklists, SLAs and escalation rules consistently.
• Maintain complete, auditable records of evidence, pending items, decisions, approvals and follow-up actions.
• Manage the compliance pipeline by risk, priority and SLA, and escalate higher-risk cases to the appropriate leadership or governance forum.
• Work with Operations, Fraud, Risk, Credit, Product, Engineering and Data to strengthen controls, and support risk assessments, control testing, metrics, playbooks and training.
• Contribute to automation requirements and validation while preserving human review and auditability.

Required profile

• 2+ years of experience in Compliance Operations, KYC/KYB, AML/CFT, transaction monitoring or customer onboarding, ideally in a fintech, financial institution or payments company.
• Practical experience reviewing legal entities, UBOs, ownership structures, customer documentation and AML/CFT alerts.
• Knowledge of customer due diligence, enhanced due diligence, PEP and sanctions screening, adverse media and suspicious-activity escalation.
• Ability to manage high-volume queues, meet SLAs and keep clear, auditable case records.
• Fluent Portuguese and professional working proficiency in English.

Nice to have

• AML/CFT or compliance experience in Brazil, Mexico or Colombia.
• Case-management, screening or transaction-monitoring tools.
• Regulatory reporting, audit, control testing or remediation experience.
• Spanish proficiency.
• Interest in workflow automation, data analysis or AI in compliance.

What we offer

• Competitive salary and stock options (ESOP) from day one.
• Annual learning budget and accelerated development paths.
• English as the working language, with Spanish and Portuguese every day.