Technical Program Manager, Data & Audit Readiness

• Act as the program management layer for the Data team during audits, interfacing with internal Audit coordination teams (Risk and Security), Finance, Compliance, and external auditors.
• Own audit readiness as a continuous, always-on practice. Proactively maintaining inventories, playbooks, and catalogs between audits, not only once one is actively underway.
• Create and manage an inventory of audit tests, expected requests, and response playbooks for Data team-owned systems and processes.
• Maintain a catalog of data sources in scope for audit, including known issues, readiness status, and areas for improvement, supported by ongoing testing including mock testing and identification of areas requiring reengineering.
• Align closely with business stakeholders such as Finance, Security, and Compliance to provide guidance and coordination support during audit activities.
• Implement tagging and governance processes, in collaboration with Data Governance, to identify endorsed datasets and tables considered ‘audit ready.’
• Manage the auditor data access role to ensure access is fit for purpose.

• 7+ years of experience in program or project management, audit coordination, or data governance, ideally within a regulated or heavily audited environment in financial services.
• Experience with SOC, SOX, IT general controls, or other regulatory audit frameworks.
• Experience coordinating audit engagements or acting as a liaison between technical teams and Internal Audit, Risk, Compliance, or external auditors.
• Strong organizational skills, with experience building and maintaining inventories, playbooks, or documentation for recurring cross-functional processes.
• Familiarity with data cataloging, tagging, or governance practices, and how they support audit readiness and control certification.
• Understanding of data access management principles and the ability to evaluate whether access is fit for purpose.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to produce documentation that satisfies both technical stakeholders and auditors.

Nice to haves

• Familiarity with audit management platforms (e.g., AuditBoard, Jira, Workiva).
• Knowledge of automated control design and control automation.
• Prior experience building or scaling a SOC, SOX or a control system in a hyper-growth or first-year SOX company.
• PMP, CAPM, or similar program/project management certification.

Payward - the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks - has spent the last 15 years building one of the most modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platforms in the industry, built to advance an open, global financial system., Founded in 2011, Kraken is one of the world’s longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions across the globe. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services, with products built for both individual investors and institutional clients.

Payward’s Data team builds and operates the data infrastructure, pipelines, and analytics platforms that power decision-making, reporting, and controls across the business. The team partners closely with functions across the company, including Risk & Audit, IT, Finance, and Engineering, to make sure the data those functions depend on is reliable, well-governed, and ready to stand up to scrutiny.

This role sits within the Data & Audit Readiness team and is dedicated to acting as the program management and coordination layer between the Data team and internal Audit, Risk, Security, Finance, Compliance, and external auditors. You will own the inventories, playbooks, catalogs, and access processes that keep the Data team’s systems and datasets audit ready, translating audit engagements directly into coordinated, well-documented responses. This is a hands-on coordination role where you will build the inventories, playbooks, and governance processes that let the Data team turn audit requests into a repeatable, provable state of readiness.

This is an individual contributor role with no direct reports, sitting under the Director, Regulatory Analytics & Reporting.