Japan Broker-Dealer Legal Compliance Manager

📋 Description

• • Own the end-to-end legal and compliance framework for Alpaca’s soon-to-launch Japan broker-dealer entity, translating U.S. best practices into a fully localized, regulator-ready operation that will serve as the gold standard for fintech expansion in Japan.
• • Serve as the primary liaison with the Japan Financial Services Agency (JFSA), Securities Dealers Association (JSDA), and other domestic regulators, preparing and submitting license applications, rule-filing responses, and periodic reports while cultivating relationships that accelerate approvals and reduce friction.
• • Draft, review, and negotiate all Japan-facing customer, vendor, and partnership agreements—ranging from omnibus custody arrangements to market-data licensing—ensuring every clause aligns with both Japanese securities law and Alpaca’s global risk appetite.
• • Build and maintain a living compliance manual that covers trading surveillance, best-execution, KYC/AML, suitability, advertising, and cybersecurity, then socialize it across product, engineering, and operations teams so that compliance becomes a design principle rather than a last-mile checkbox.
• • Design and run quarterly risk assessments that map emerging regulatory themes (e.g., crypto-asset rules, margin lending caps, cross-border data transfer restrictions) to concrete engineering tickets, giving leadership a clear, quantified view of residual risk and mitigation cost.
• • Partner with U.S. counsel and external Japanese law firms to monitor legislative amendments and regulatory guidance, translating complex bulletins into plain-English playbooks that enable front-line staff to make compliant decisions without waiting for legal sign-off.
• • Lead incident-response for regulatory inquiries, customer complaints, and potential market-rule violations, coordinating evidence collection, root-cause analysis, and remediation plans that satisfy both regulators and our internal audit committee.
• • Spearhead employee training programs—from onboarding modules for new hires to advanced refreshers for senior traders—leveraging e-learning, live workshops, and scenario-based testing to maintain a 100 % completion rate and measurable knowledge retention.
• • Oversee the implementation and tuning of compliance technology (surveillance, e-communications archiving, trade reporting) in partnership with engineering, ensuring alerts are actionable, false-positive rates stay below industry benchmarks, and audit trails are immutable.
• • Champion a culture of transparency by publishing monthly compliance dashboards to the executive team, highlighting key metrics such as rule-2-45 best-execution outliers, AML alert resolution times, and customer disclosure defect rates.
• • Collaborate with product managers to pre-approve new features—fractional shares, options strategies, crypto staking—before they reach beta, providing legal sign-off that balances innovation velocity with regulatory certainty.
• • Represent Alpaca at industry working groups, roundtables, and JSDA committees, shaping the regulatory agenda while positioning the company as a thought leader in digital-first broker-dealer services.
• • Mentor junior compliance analysts and legal coordinators, creating career paths that deepen in-house expertise and reduce reliance on external counsel over time.
• • Prepare board-level briefings that distill complex regulatory developments into strategic choices—such as whether to pursue additional licenses, expand product lines, or adjust pricing models—complete with scenario analysis and recommended next steps.
• • Continuously benchmark Alpaca’s Japan program against global peers (e.g., U.S. FINRA, UK FCA, Singapore MAS) to identify best practices that can be imported and adapted, ensuring our offering remains best-in-class across jurisdictions.