Trade Surveillance Specialist

About this role

G MASS Consulting are partnered with a leading Hedge Fund, as they seek a Trade Surveillance professional to join its Compliance and Surveillance team in New York.
This role is ideal for someone who combines hands-on trade surveillance experience with strong data manipulation and transformation skills. The role has a combination of BAU surveillance responsibilities, as well as process and data transformation initiatives to enhance detection capabilities, data quality, and automation.
Equally important is mindset. The team is small, fast-moving, and highly commercial, and the successful candidate will be someone who takes ownership from day one, works without hand-holding, and actively looks for ways to make the surveillance framework better.
This position is based in the firm’s New York office, five days per week on site.
Responsibilities:

• Monitor and review daily surveillance alerts across both client-facing and proprietary business flows, ensuring timely and accurate disposition.

• Investigate potential market abuse, insider trading, and other trading anomalies across multiple asset classes, escalating issues where necessary.

• Conduct deep-dive analysis of the trading activity underpinning alerts, synthesising transactional data, market data, market context, client risk profiles, execution timing, and other potential risk factors.

• Document investigation findings in line with compliance procedures.

• Feed into and drive change initiatives to refine alert parameters, tune detection logic, and where necessary rewrite alert definitions outright - covering risk while aggressively minimising noise.

• Collaborate on the design and development of internal tooling to streamline governance, automate operational workflows, and stand up auxiliary monitoring platforms.

• Work with technology teams to optimise the data feeds, logic, and infrastructure supporting surveillance tools.

• Take ownership of process and data improvement initiatives end to end, identifying opportunities proactively rather than waiting for direction.

• Assist with periodic reviews, regulatory requests, and audit queries.

• Contribute to ongoing enhancements of the surveillance framework and data architecture.
Requirements

• A genuine ownership mindset. The team is deliberately lean and does not operate with close supervision: you will be expected to identify what needs doing, drive it to completion, and hold yourself accountable end to end.

• Hands-on experience in trade surveillance, compliance monitoring, or control functions at a hedge fund, investment bank, or asset manager.

• Understanding of US and global market abuse regulations and surveillance practices across asset classes, including familiarity with the SEC and FINRA regulatory framework.

• Strong data analysis and data manipulation capability, including SQL, with the ability to interrogate large datasets and turn findings into practical improvements.

• Demonstrated experience balancing BAU surveillance work with data transformation or enhancement projects.

• Comfortable operating as the bridge between compliance and technology - writing requirements, supporting UAT, and holding technology teams to account.

• Exposure to surveillance platforms such as Actimize or SMARTS, including scenario and rule design, alert calibration, and threshold tuning, is advantageous.

• Curiosity and a demonstrable track record of improving the processes you inherit rather than simply operating them.
Benefits
Rate: up to $1150/d, dependent on experience
Length: 12 months, with the likelihood of extension or a strong permanent conversion pathway. Standout performers have a genuine route to permanent positions