Deriv Finance/FinTech

Senior Specialist - Risk Management

Dubai, United Arab Emirates In person Full-time

Individual Contributor role — you'll lead through analysis and judgment, not people management.

We're not hiring someone to fill out risk registers. We're hiring someone to figure out why a risk model missed something last quarter — and build the system that catches it next time.

Why this matters

Deriv's mission is Trading for Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime. Millions of traders, in multiple currencies, across regulatory regimes, around the clock. At that scale, risk doesn't wait for a quarterly review cycle — it moves as fast as the market does.

Real money, real regulations, real consequences. We're already building risk operations that run continuously: dozens of fraud detection models flagging money-movement patterns and trading abuse in production, AML review pulling risk metrics automatically instead of by hand, and vendor risk assessments run through document analysis instead of a checklist. Not experiments — systems that are already catching things a person reviewing spreadsheets would miss. You'll own the next layer of that.

Why Deriv

  • We're in production, not planning.
  • Fraud detection models running continuously across money movement, trading abuse, and document forgery
  • Automated AML review: data aggregation, risk metric computation, high-risk client flagging
  • Investigation portals that synthesise findings into unified risk profiles instead of scattered notes
  • We've proved the model works. You're not waiting for a pilot to get approved — you're extending something that already runs.
  • Scope of Work
  • Five things
  • sit with you. All of them cover the entire business — financial and
  • non-financial risk, every entity, every jurisdiction:

Risk

  • Framework Ownership — Owning the enterprise risk framework end to
  • end: taxonomy, appetite, assessment methodology and the control mapping
  • underneath it. Market, credit, counterparty, liquidity and capital risk sit
  • here alongside operational, technology, third-party, conduct, financial crime
  • and strategic risk.

Regulatory

  • Obligations Across Jurisdictions — Owning the
  • risk view of everything each licence demands: prudential and capital
  • requirements, client money and safeguarding, leverage and product rules,
  • conduct and client outcomes, financial crime, reporting, outsourcing,
  • resilience and governance. Keeping it consistent where jurisdictions differ, and
  • turning regulatory change into action with lead time.

Predictive

  • Risk — Building the forward-looking layer of the
  • risk function. Leading indicators, predictive models, emerging risk
  • identification and horizon scanning, so exposure gets flagged while it’s still
  • cheap to fix rather than explained after it isn’t.
  • Testing,

Monitoring & Remediation — Stress

  • testing, scenario design, control testing, KRIs and risk reporting — and then
  • chasing remediation until the exposure is measurably smaller, not just
  • documented.

AI-Driven

  • Transformation — Building the tools. Designing and deploying
  • the models, automated monitoring and analytics the risk function runs on,
  • embedding them into daily workflow, and governing them so the output can be
  • trusted.

What You'll Do

Own the framework across the

whole business

  • Build and maintain the risk framework covering

financial and non-financial risk — when it misses something, it's your problem

until it's fixed

  • Monitor capital, liquidity, market, credit and

counterparty exposure against internal limits set above the regulatory floor,

not at it

  • Map controls to every material risk, name the
  • risks running without one, and spot where several acceptable exposures combine
  • into one that isn't
  • Own the regulatory picture
  • Keep one clear view of what every licence

requires — prudential, conduct, client money, financial crime, reporting,

outsourcing, resilience — and what the business is doing about each

  • Track regulatory change and say what has to be

done differently, early enough for it to matter

  • Give inspections, submissions and regulatory

requests risk data that holds up under examination

Predict, don't react

  • Build leading indicators that move before the

risk does, and predictive models that flag exposure while it's still cheap to

fix

  • Run horizon scanning across regulation,

markets, technology, competitors and geopolitics, and turn it into risks the

business recognises as its own

  • Review new products, new markets and major
  • change before launch, and say what could go wrong while there's still time to
  • design it out
  • Test it, then drive it down
  • Design stress tests that actually stress

something, and defend the results when they're inconvenient

  • Set KRIs with thresholds specific enough to be

breached, escalate with a recommendation attached, and report one connected

picture to management, committees and the board

  • Chase action plans to closure and verify the
  • exposure actually fell — measured on the indicator, not asserted in an email
  • Build the AI the function runs
  • on
  • Design and deploy models, automated monitoring

and analytics yourself — this is a build role, not a role that uses someone

else's tools

  • Embed them into how the team works day to day,

so analyst time goes to judgment instead of data collection

  • Govern what you build: inventory, validation,
  • performance monitoring. Know when a flag is noise and when it's the start of
  • something real, and push back when a dashboard calls something a risk that
  • isn't

Who You Are

You've

  • managed risk across a whole business, not one segment of it. 5-8 years in risk management within financial services, trading or a
  • regulated brokerage, covering financial and non-financial risk. You can go from
  • a capital calculation to a vendor concentration issue to a conduct risk
  • assessment in the same week and be credible in all three. You think in
  • exposure, not in process — you can see where an operation is fragile before a
  • test proves it.

You've built

  • a framework someone actually used. Taxonomy,
  • appetite, methodology, indicators, reporting. You know which parts change
  • behaviour and which parts just generate paper. And you finish things: you
  • follow actions to closure and check the risk moved, because an action closed on
  • a tracker that left the exposure where it was isn't closed.

You know CFD

  • products, the platforms they run on, and the regulation around both. Required. Leverage, margin, negative balance protection, hedging
  • models, client positioning — and how each turns into exposure. Prudential and
  • capital frameworks: IFR/IFD, Basel principles as applied to investment firms,
  • MiFID II conduct requirements. You can read a licence condition in any
  • jurisdiction and say what it means operationally.

You work

  • forward, not backward. You're more interested
  • in what's coming than what already happened, and you can point to a time you
  • flagged something before it became a problem and explain how you knew. You've
  • built leading indicators or predictive analysis that changed a decision, not
  • just a report.
  • You build AI,
  • you don't just use it. Comfortable in large
  • datasets and confident with the statistics behind a model. You've built or
  • deployed something that runs in production — automated monitoring, a predictive
  • model, an analytics pipeline — and embedded it into how a team works, not left
  • it as a proof of concept. You understand where models are strong, where they
  • need a person, and how to govern the difference. You don't need direct reports
  • to have influence: when your assessment says something matters, people act on
  • it because the reasoning holds.

The Honest Reality

This is demanding work. You'll own outcomes with incomplete data, because incomplete data is the only kind risk work ever gets. You'll navigate friction between trading, compliance, and leadership when they all want different answers. You'll establish standards that other analysts get measured against, and defend a risk finding to stakeholders who'd rather it wasn't true.

But you'll build frameworks that outlast the quarter they were written for. You'll work with AI tools that make your analysis sharper instead of slower. And you'll know that when you flag something, it's the reason it got fixed before it became a headline.

If you want risk work that's mostly documentation, this isn't it. If you want to find what the models miss, it might be.

Job description provided by Deriv.
View the original posting