Senior AFC Operations Specialist (f/m/x)

About lemon.markets 🍋

We enable anyone to be an investor. Our mission is to grow investing opportunities for all European customers and businesses. By empowering FinTechs, banks, and wealth managers to offer investment products, we help create financial well-being for their customers.

lemon.markets is a Brokerage-as-a-Service platform: simple digital access to capital markets through a single API. Our API-first infrastructure abstracts brokerage complexity with a well-documented API, a self-service customer operations portal, and a clear regulatory framework, so partners can launch customer-centric, compliant products in weeks, not months.

As part of the dwpbank Group, we share a clear goal: we enable anyone to be an investor by making investing in capital markets more accessible. By combining dwpbank’s long-standing expertise and stability with lemon.markets’ technology-first mindset and speed, we are building a modern, modular securities services ecosystem. Together, we offer faster time-to-market, modular services, and a modern customer experience that helps financial service providers stay competitive and respond more flexibly in a changing market.

Your Mission

As our Senior AFC Operations Specialist, you play a key role in protecting lemon.markets, its partners and their customers from financial crime risks across the customer lifecycle. Sitting in the Customer Lifecycle Domain, you work closely with the Team Lead, Product, Engineering and the Second Line of Defence to ensure AFC operations are effective, scalable and audit-ready. Over the next 6 to 12 months, your focus will be on strengthening and further developing core AFC processes such as transaction monitoring, customer screening, Source of Wealth reviews, investigations and regulatory information requests. This role combines hands-on case work with process ownership and cross-functional project work, making it central to how we manage risk while enabling sustainable growth. You will help create the structure, documentation and controls needed in a fast-moving and highly regulated environment. Your work will directly support operational quality, regulatory resilience and the ability to scale our platform with confidence.

In this role you will:

• Own day-to-day AFC operations across transaction monitoring, customer screening, Source of Wealth reviews, investigations and regulatory information requests, ensuring risk-based decisions are well documented and operational work meets regulatory and internal standards.

• Investigate potentially suspicious customer activity and collaborate closely with the Team Lead, MLRO and Second Line of Defence to prepare escalations and SAR-related documentation where needed, helping protect lemon.markets and its partners from financial crime risks.

• Design and improve AFC controls, workflows and work instructions across the customer lifecycle together with Operations, Product and Engineering, creating more scalable, efficient and reliable processes.

• Drive process optimisation and operational projects such as strengthening transaction monitoring setups, reducing manual effort and improving control effectiveness through better tooling, automation and structured workflows.

• Collaborate with stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Operations, Banking and Investing domains as well as external partners, acting as a trusted AFC subject-matter expert and helping teams make sound, compliant decisions.

• Maintain clear, precise and audit-ready documentation for operational cases, processes and decisions, creating transparency for internal stakeholders, external partners and control functions.
  

You’ll be successful in this role if you:

• Bring substantial hands-on AFC Operations experience within financial services, including investigations, operational controls and risk-based decision-making.

• Have practical experience preparing and submitting suspicious activity reports via goAML and a strong understanding of suspicious activity handling in an operational environment.

• Have solid experience improving, automating and scaling AFC processes and are comfortable contributing to project work across operational and technical stakeholders.

• Have a deep understanding of German and European AML requirements, regulatory expectations and industry best practices.

• Are fluent in German at C2 level and communicate confidently in English at C1 level.

• Work with a hands-on, ownership-driven mindset, bring structure to ambiguity, and balance confidence in your expertise with the humility to keep learning in a fast-changing regulatory environment.
  

How we take care of you

• 🚀 Compensation package: We offer you a competitive salary, based on your experience and the value-add you bring to lemon.markets.

• 🕑 Flexible working hours: We trust people to choose when they work best and avoid a rigid 9 to 5 mindset. You decide on the rhythm that helps you do your best work, with only shared core hours from 12:00 to 16:00 to support collaboration.

• 🏢 Hybrid work setup: You can work from anywhere in Germany within a hybrid model. At the same time, in-person collaboration is a key part of our culture. That being said, individual contributer lemoneers work 4 days or more per month on-site in our Berlin office, spending quality time together with the team at events, onsites/offsites or over team dinners.

• 📈 Grow with us: We take your personal development seriously! You’ll get regular mentorship and stretch opportunities, a clear career development framework with frequent feedback conversations as well as an annual learning budget.

• 🌱 People & culture: You’ll feel our culture in the small things, like Polaroids from our lemoneers’ first day and our monthly new-joiner breakfasts. But also in the bigger things, like celebrating the onboarding of new partners or our annual offsites, where the whole company comes together to connect, reflect, and celebrate.

• 💛 Perks & benefits: We choose benefits that add actual value. We sponsor a Deutschlandticket for employees on unlimited contracts, plus 50% off on Beatvest - our partner for financial education and investing.

• 🏝 Workation: Get out of here! At lemon.markets you can work remotely from anywhere in the EU for up to 10 consecutive days at a time, and up to 60 days per year in total.

As an equal opportunity employer, lemon.markets is c