Security & Compliance Lead

What is Spade?

Spade’s API delivers clean, structured transaction data for modern financial institutions. In real-time, we link transactions to verified businesses in our proprietary merchant database, returning standardized merchant names, categories, and geolocation fields. Customers including Stripe, FIS, Bilt, Corpay, and Mercury use Spade to support real-time authorization, personalize experiences, attribute rewards accurately, and streamline downstream analytics.

We’re a fast growing, Series A company backed by industry experts and top tier investors (including a16z, Flourish Ventures, Y-Combinator, and Gradient Ventures). We lead the market in terms of merchant coverage, speed of enrichment, and data accuracy, and enrich tens of billions of dollars in transaction volume monthly. 

We’re a small and mighty hybrid team, passionate about building exceptional products for our rapidly growing customer base. We care deeply about diversity of background, experience, and opinion. We value empathy, curiosity, and passion, and strive to create an environment where individuals have autonomy and the ability to take ownership over their work.

What will you be doing?

We're looking for our first Security & Compliance hire to help make security a strategic growth lever for Spade. We provide critical financial infrastructure, and our customers demand rigor, resilience, and credibility. In this role, you’ll set the vision and build the foundation for security across the organization, partnering with cross-functional leadership to drive best practices in secure development and operations. Responsibilities include:  

• Leading security strategy and functional controls oversight
• Developing core policies, controls, and processes to support audit and regulatory requirements
• Coordinating and managing certification processes and external audits (including but not limited to SOC2, pen tests, GDPR, etc, etc)
• Supporting revenue growth by completing customer security and compliance questionnaires
• Advising the engineering team on embedding security best practices into cloud architecture and development workflows
• Serving as the primary point of contact for security with customers, partners, and regulators
• Creating external facing content on security posture and measures (e.g., whitepapers)

What experience, skills, and qualifications are necessary? 

• 4+ years of experience in security, compliance, or risk, preferably in a startup environment
• 2+ years of experience in fintech or financial services
• Deep understanding of cloud-native security (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and secure development practices
• Experience obtaining and managing compliance certifications (SOC2, PCI, ISO, GDPR, etc)
• Experience supporting sales in a security and compliance role, including completing vendor due diligence questionnaires and diligence calls
• Familiarity with Vanta or similar compliance management platforms 
• Strong communication skills and a track record of cross-functional influence
• Nice to have: experience with payments and payments-related security practices 

Why join Spade? 

• Be a cultural founder. As an early employee, you’ll play a meaningful role in defining and building our culture. 
• Get in on the ground floor. We’re a small but well-funded team – joining now comes with limited risk and unlimited upside. 
• Build the next generation of financial infrastructure. The future of finance will be built on better data, and Spade powers that. You’ll have the opportunity to drive impact at scale, helping industry leaders build more innovative products and services for consumers.

Benefits include:

• Competitive compensation and equity package
• Full medical, dental, and vision benefits for US-based employees
• Life & short-term disability insurance
• Flexible PTO
• Early exercise program
• Extended post-termination exercise period
• 401K for retirement planning
• Hybrid team, with pet-friendly headquarters in NYC
• Paid parental leave
• Work from home stipend

Diversity & Inclusion at Spade:

Spade is an equal opportunity employer, committed to building a culture that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. We believe that having people with different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives not only helps us build the best products for our customers, but also helps us be the best version of ourselves.

As part of our commitment to health and safety, Spade requires employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as permitted under applicable law.

Salary Range:

• At Spade, we view total compensation as consisting of salary + equity + benefits. We recruit motivated and high performing talent, and work to compensate people in line with the value they bring to our team. 
• We aim to pay fairly and competitively, and consider a number of factors in developing compensation offers. These factors include years and breadth of experience, interview performance, market dynamics, and internal equity. 
• The anticipated base salary range for this role is between $150,000 and $170,000, and an equity grant.