Trade Surveillance Analyst

About the Company

Sei Labs is a unicorn startup based in NYC building Sei, the fastest EVM blockchain in the world designed for trading. We're building a decentralized Wall Street. We're a lean, remote-first team that ships fast, takes full ownership of outcomes and builds from first principles.

Sei Labs is incubating a new US regulated exchange from zero to one. You'd be the first hire in your function, with the speed and ownership of a startup and the backing of an established company and an S-tier team (Robinhood, Coinbase, Google, etc.)

About the role

As our first trading Surveillance Analyst, you will be a founding member of the DCM's market regulation function. You will monitor trading activity on the exchange, investigate alerts, and help build the surveillance program, procedures and tooling we launch with. This role starts hands-on and detail-heavy. As the exchange goes live and the team grows, there is a clear path to more complex investigations and team leadership.

What you'll do

• Monitor real-time and post-trade activity for potential manipulation, fraud and disruptive trading practices (spoofing, layering, wash trading, pre-arranged trading, position-limit breaches and similar).
• Triage and investigate alerts in our surveillance platform: reconstruct orders and trades, decide whether an alert is an error, a false positive or a potential violation, and document the reasoning clearly.
• Run participant inquiry workflows, including broker explanation requests, and work directly with FCMs and clearing members to gather information and resolve cases.
• Escalate potential rule violations and prepare well-documented case files for review, enforcement and regulatory inquiries, under the direction of the head of trade surveillance and/or market regulation.
• Help design our case-management flow, alert tuning and automation so the program scales as volume grows.
• Contribute to written surveillance procedures and DCM Core Principle readiness ahead of launch.
• Ownhigh-volume first-line alert review, and earn broader investigative ownership as the function grows.
• Participate in coverage for a 24/7 market, which may include scheduled weekend or off-hours rotations.

What you bring

• 2–5+ years in trade or market surveillance at an exchange or regulator (e.g., DCM, national securities exchage, CFTC, SEC, NFA, or FINRA) strongly preferred; trading compliance experience at an FCM, broker-dealer, or trading firm strongly considered.
• Hands-on experience investigating surveillance alerts, ideally in Nasdaq SMARTS or a comparable platform (Eventus Validus, TT Score, NICE Actimize, Solidus, b-next).
• Working knowledge of manipulative and disruptive trading patterns and how to evidence them.
• Experience with digital assets and digital assets investigations, as well as traditional financial instruments and futures or other derivatives, including on-chain analysis and forensic tracing of wallets and fund flows using tools such as Chainalysis, TRM Labs, or Elliptic..
• Clear, professional written and verbal communication. You will deal directly with external FCMs and clearing members.
• Strong attention to detail and disciplined documentation habits.
• Comfort with ambiguity, shifting priorities and building process where none exists yet.
• Ability to work from approved security devices and environments, and to comply with information barrier, conflict-of-interest, and personal trading policies, including restrictions on trading in markets we surveil.
• Nice to have
• SQL, Python or other data tooling for analysis and automating repetitive surveillance work.
• Experience with 24/7 markets, or crypto derivatives.
• Exposure to CFTC/NFA regulation, DCM Core Principles or rule-enforcement reviews.
• Interest in growing into a team lead or manager role as the function scales.