S

Sardine

Detects fraud and money laundering for banks and fintechs

Payroll Specialist

Full-Time
No salary listed
Senior
Remote in USA+1 moreMore locations: Remote in Canada
RemoteRemote work is limited to the country where you are hired.
AccountingPayroll Accounting

About the job

Requirements
  • At least 5 years of payroll experience, including independently processing multi-state United States payroll.
  • Experience with payroll tax compliance and state agencies; Canadian payroll experience is required.
  • Experience with correction runs, retroactive payments, tax notices, and year-end reporting.
  • Experience with payroll platforms such as Rippling and Deel, and retirement plan vendors such as Fidelity or Wealthsimple.
  • Strong knowledge of United States federal, state, and local payroll regulations and tax requirements.
  • Strong understanding of payroll accounting, including accruals, liabilities, reconciliations, and year-end reporting.
  • Experience supporting year-end financial statement audits and preparing payroll audit schedules.
  • Ability to analyze payroll data, identify discrepancies, and resolve complex issues.
  • Strong attention to detail and commitment to accuracy.
  • Ability to manage deadlines in a high-compliance, deadline-driven environment.
  • High level of integrity, discretion, and professionalism in handling confidential information.
  • Strong interpersonal skills and ability to work cross-functionally with People, Finance, IT, and international teams.
Responsibilities
  • Oversee and execute end-to-end global payroll across United States and other global entities, as well as employer-of-record and contractor arrangements worldwide.
  • Process off-cycle and correction payroll runs, including retroactive pay, sign-on bonuses, commissions, garnishments, and short-term, long-term, and state disability payments.
  • Manage relationships and service-level agreement performance with global payroll, employer-of-record, and benefits platforms, including Rippling, Deel, Fidelity, and Wealthsimple.
  • Establish standard operating procedures, internal controls, and variance reporting standards to ensure accuracy in period-over-period payroll, off-cycle adjustments, and foreign-exchange reconciliations.
  • Support annual United States payroll compliance reporting, including preparation, review, and audit of W-2s.
  • Manage payroll tax registrations, agency notices, quarterly amendments, unemployment claims, and year-end corrections.
  • Oversee governance, funding, and reconciliation for domestic and international retirement programs, including United States 401(k) and Canadian RRSP, and resolve regulatory or provider challenges.
  • Partner with People Operations to ensure tax compliance for global equity awards, Carta transactions, sign-on bonuses, garnishments, and short-term, long-term, and state disability disbursements.
  • Manage employee stipends and expense reimbursements.
  • Support accruals, including commissions, bonuses, payroll taxes, and benefits.
  • Ensure accuracy of payroll-related balance sheet accounts and support monthly and year-end reconciliations.
Desired Qualifications
  • Additional international payroll experience is a plus.

About the company

S

Sardine

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Sardine builds software that catches fraud and money laundering for banks, fintechs, and merchants, covering customer sign-up checks, payment fraud, account takeovers, and anti-money-laundering compliance in one system. Rather than relying only on names and addresses, it profiles the device and behavior behind each session, such as how a person types or moves a mouse, to judge whether a user is who they claim to be. Clients send customer events through its platform and get back real-time risk scores, while AI agents help investigators screen sanctions lists, review alerts, and manage cases. Sardine was founded in 2020 and is based in San Francisco.

Company Size

201-500

Company Stage

Series C

Total Funding

$145.6M

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2020

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Banks are buying in: National Bank of Canada led a $25 million round in May 2026 alongside a multi-year deal.
  • Customers keep signing: Sardine went from over 300 enterprise clients in February 2025 to over 500 by September 2026.
  • Leaving doesn't forfeit your options: staff get up to four years after departure to exercise, versus the usual 90 days.

What critics are saying

  • Rivals share its top rating: by August 2026, research firm Forrester also named SAS, SymphonyAI and Visa Leaders.
  • Expect cross-time-zone work: Sardine's 200+ staff work from anywhere, spread across more than 20 countries.
  • Some deals put its own money at risk: Sardine will guarantee businesses against fraud losses on card transactions.

What makes Sardine unique

  • Its CEO fought fraud at a crypto exchange: Soups Ranjan ran data science and risk at Coinbase before Sardine.
  • Banks and fintechs pool fraud data through it: its Sonar network checks emails, phones and bank accounts against shared flags.
  • It builds its own fraud AI: Sardine AI Labs, launched September 2026, reported a 68% accuracy gain in issuer tests.

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Benefits

  • Generous compensation in cash and equity
  • 7-year for post-termination option exercise (vs. standard 90 days)
  • Early exercise for all options, including pre-vested
  • Work from anywhere: Remote-first Culture
  • Unlimited paid time off and minimum 2 weeks/year of mandatory vacation
  • 100% of health insurance, dental, and vision coverage for employees and 60% for dependents
  • 4% matching in 401k
  • Company-wide offsites, the last one was at Miami
  • MacBook Pro delivered to your door
  • One-time stipend to set up a home office — desk, monitors, etc.
  • Monthly meal stipend
  • Monthly health and wellness stipend

Growth & Insights and Company News

6 month growth

0%

1 year growth

2%

2 year growth

-2%
Financing Your Way
Oct 1st, 2026
Sardine launches AI research lab.

Sardine launches AI research lab. Sardine's new AI Labs aims to reduce retail fraud and payment risks through advanced behavioral intelligence and real-time threat detection. Curated by Financing Your Way from original reporting by Finextra - Lending. Summary is AI-assisted and editorially reviewed - see its editorial standards. Fighting fraud just got more sophisticated with the launch of Sardine AI Labs. This new research initiative focuses on 'agentic risk' platforms. For retailers, this means more accurate fraud detection that works in real-time. The technology aims to stop payment fraud and account takeovers before they impact your bottom line. As more consumers use digital financing and BNPL options, the risk of sophisticated identity theft increases. Sardine is developing AI that can think like a fraudster to stay one step ahead. For your business, this translates to higher approval rates for legitimate customers and fewer costly chargebacks. The goal of this research is to move beyond simple rule-based security. Instead, these AI models look at behavioral patterns to catch complex scams that traditional systems might miss. Integrating advanced fraud detection allows you to offer seamless financing at checkout without the friction of manual reviews. This technology is particularly relevant for high-ticket items where a single fraudulent transaction can wipe out the margins of several sales. As financial crimes become more automated, having an automated defense becomes a necessity for modern operators. Who else is covering this

Sardine
Sep 30th, 2026
Sardine launches dedicated AI research Lab and $375,000 in research fellowships to advance fraud and financial crime prevention.

Sardine launches dedicated AI research Lab and $375,000 in research fellowships to advance fraud and financial crime prevention. * Sardine AI Labs will focus on production-grade fraud and financial crime AI models that meet real world latency, governance, and explainability requirements * Early results from its foundational AI model for card transaction fraud showed a 68% improvement in fraud detection accuracy for a consumer card issuer, and a 41% improvement for a business card issuer Sardine, the leading agentic risk platform for fighting fraud and financial crime, today launched Sardine AI Labs, an applied research group advancing frontier intelligence to fight financial crime. The team will study how AI can learn the language of financial behavior, anticipate new attacks and help risk teams make better decisions. Alongside the launch, Sardine is opening applications for up to 5 research fellowships, awarded to independent researchers working to advance the lab's early results. The next wave of foundation-model innovation is expected to come from domain-specific AI neolabs with access to proprietary, real-world data. Fraud and financial crime prevention is a prime example: even leading academic researchers often lack the large-scale datasets needed to advance the field. Sardine AI Labs is addressing this gap by tackling some of the most complex challenges in fraud and financial crime prevention. Much like any language, payment activity and financial access behavior contain distinct patterns. Transaction histories, devices, and IP addresses form behavioral profiles that foundation models can analyze to identify anomalies and detect potential fraud. "We are uniquely positioned to train a model purpose-built for risk because we sit on the industry's fastest growing fraud and fincrime dataset, which spans more than 6.5B devices, 441M consumers, 3.4M businesses, 6.6 billion transactions and $1.8 trillion in payments," said Soups Ranjan, CEO and Co-founder of Sardine. "Sardine AI Labs will focus on production-grade models that meet real world latency, governance, and explainability requirements." Solving the hardest challenges in financial crime. Financial crime prevention remains costly for financial institutions, contributing to higher payment-processing expenses across card, ACH, and wire transactions. Foundation models have the potential to address persistent challenges that drive these costs. One example is sanctions screening. Consumers with common names or identities similar to those on sanctions lists can be incorrectly flagged, delaying onboarding for weeks while financial institutions conduct manual reviews. Accurately determining whether two records refer to the same individual remains a complex challenge. Another is detecting money laundering, terrorist financing, and transactions linked to drug trafficking among the billions of payments processed by banks. Existing systems can generate false positives that delay legitimate transactions while still failing to identify illicit activity, exposing financial institutions to significant regulatory and financial consequences. Foundation models could improve the accuracy and efficiency of both processes. Sardine AI Labs will explore AI research problems around modeling very large sequences of transaction and user behavior events, transfer learning, adversarial robustness, and explainability. The goal is to turn advances in AI into measurable protection against financial crime. Grounded in Sardine's network of device, identity, behavioral, and transaction data, the lab is developing models that can understand complex financial behavior and detect attacks they were never explicitly trained to find. Early findings show stronger fraud detection across issuers. Sardine AI Labs also published early results from a foundation transformer-based model trained to learn patterns across complete cardholder transaction histories. The card model was trained on about a billion transactions over the last 2 years from over a dozen card issuers. One of the hardest fraud prevention challenges for new card issuers is the cold-start problem. At launch, these issuers lack the training data needed to detect fraud reliably, yet they are often among the first targets of fraud rings seeking to exploit newly released financial products. Sardine AI Labs' new card foundation model is designed to address this challenge. In testing with issuers that were entirely excluded from the model's training data, the model improved fraud detection accuracy by 68% for a consumer card issuer and 41% for a business card issuer compared with standard machine-learning approaches. The accuracy gains were consistent across consumer, business, and global cross-border card issuers, demonstrating the model's ability to generalize across different types of card programs. "The most important finding is that foundation models can learn directly from a user's transaction behavior, allowing us to identify fraud more accurately than approaches that reduce that behavior to a set of tabular features," said Niranjan Shetty, Head of Data Science at Sardine. "Because these patterns transfer across financial institutions, the model is not limited to a single card program. The next step is to make this intelligence fast, explainable, and reliable enough to support real-world risk decisions." "The frontier AI labs have shown the immense benefits of having multi-modal AI models which allow you to extract intelligence across different modalities of audio, video and text. We think that the next unlock in fraud and fincrime prevention would occur from creating a multi-modal AI that goes across device, identity, behavioral, and transaction data. This is what excites me the most about the potential ahead with our AI Lab and I can't wait to see what our research fellows build with us," said Soups Ranjan, CEO and Co-founder of Sardine. The model architecture, training methodology, and full results are available in a new technical whitepaper. Introducing the Sardine AI Fellowship Program. Sardine invites independent researchers currently enrolled in universities in the US or Canada to build on these findings through its new AI Fellowship Program. The program will select up to five fellows to pursue research into how models can: * Generalize across card issuers * Learn from multiple streams of financial activity * Improve as data and model size scale * Perform with limited customer history * Improve identity matching * Detect money-laundering patterns * Support real-time inference in hundreds of milliseconds * Extend to areas beyond fraud Applications are open through December 13, 2026. Shortlisted applicants will be notified in December, and the inaugural cohort of fellows will be announced in mid-January 2027. To learn more and apply, visit sardine.ai/ai-labs. About sardine. Sardine is the leading agentic risk platform for fighting financial crime. Its integrated fraud and financial crime solutions unify data across risk teams, enabling real-time fraud detection and automated compliance operations. More than 500 global enterprises rely on Sardine to secure and grow their products, including category leaders across banking, fintech, wealth and retirement, HR and payroll, payments, and software. Customers include FIS, Experian, National Bank of Canada, Nubank, GoDaddy, Deel, Gusto, Paylocity, Xero, and ZoomInfo. Learn more at sardine.ai.

Sardine
Sep 17th, 2026
Sardine Partners with Notabene to bring Travel Rule compliance and Transaction Authorization into crypto risk platform.

Sardine Partners with Notabene to bring Travel Rule compliance and Transaction Authorization into crypto risk platform. Compliance Company AML Payments Sardine, the leading agentic risk platform for fighting financial crime, today announced a partnership with Notabene, the trust layer for global money movement, to bring their industry-leading transaction authorization to Sardine's platform. Through the integration, Sardine customers can manage and automate their Travel Rule requirements and transaction authorization alongside fraud, KYC/KYB, AML transaction monitoring, and sanctions screening within a single, unified platform. The partnership comes as regulatory clarity accelerates across the crypto and stablecoin industry with the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation and Transfer of Funds Regulation (MiCA/TFR), Brazil's BCB Resolution 520, and broader adoption of the Financial Action Task Force's Travel Rule standards giving companies the certainty to invest with confidence. That stability is drawing a new wave of fintechs and traditional financial institutions into the stablecoin market, and a rising demand to consolidate compliance infrastructure. The integration pairs Notabene's transaction authorization platform, and the largest network of regulated entities in the industry, with Sardine's risk platform to provide joint customers with a single point of access to both. This allows customers to not only manage Travel Rule requirements alongside the rest of their risk and compliance operations, but also feed transaction-level decisions back into Sardine to strengthen their overall risk management posture. Notabene has the deepest counterparty network in the industry, and now it's integrated directly into Sardine's platform. That means its customers can handle Travel Rule compliance alongside fraud, KYC/KYB, AML monitoring, and sanctions screening all in one place, without adding another vendor to manage. Soups Ranjan, CEO and Co-Founder of Sardine Crypto and stablecoin companies shouldn't have to choose between transaction-level or customer-level risk. Both are critical components of a robust compliance stack. By bringing its network and transaction authorization platform together with Sardine's, joint customers get real-time counterparty verification and transaction authorization running alongside the fraud and AML tools they already rely on, in one place. Alice Nawfal, Co-founder and CEO of Notabene Notabene's network connects thousands of trusted counterparties, facilitating trillions of dollars in transaction volume annually across more than 100 jurisdictions, extending the number of counterparties that customers can safely transact with, on the open-loop and ISO 20022-compatible Transaction Authorization Protocol. While Travel Rule compliance is the entry point for many of its customers, Notabene's core service is transaction authorization infrastructure, providing tools for stablecoin payment coordination, real-time transaction authorization, counterparty verification, and self-hosted wallet identification that help institutions increase their straight-through processing rates and build trust into every transaction. Sardine backs that network with a risk platform built to help crypto and stablecoin companies detect and stop financial crime across the customer lifecycle, from onboarding and KYC/KYB through transaction monitoring and sanctions screening. About Sardine Sardine is the leading agentic risk platform for fighting financial crime. Its integrated fraud and AML solutions unify data across risk teams, enabling real-time fraud detection and automated compliance operations. More than 450 global enterprises rely on Sardine to secure and grow their products, including category leaders across banking, fintech, wealth and retirement, HR and payroll, payments, and software. Customers include FIS, Experian, National Bank of Canada, Nubank, GoDaddy, Deel, Gusto, Paylocity, Xero, and ZoomInfo. Learn more at sardine.ai. About Notabene Founded in 2020 and headquartered in New York, Notabene operates the largest open network of regulated on-chain transactions, enabling 280+ institutions - such as Ripple, Copper, Crypto.com, OKX, Boerse Stuttgart, and more - to confirm and verify counterparties in real time, authorize transactions before settlement, and unlock compliant B2B stablecoin payments. Notabene connects thousands of trusted counterparties, facilitating trillions of dollars in transaction volume annually across over 100 jurisdictions. To learn more, visit notabene.id. Media contacts. Aaron Berger AM Partners (for Sardine) 917.355.8959 [email protected]

Sardine
Sep 11th, 2026
Introducing Sardine Flow: Connect data, APIs, and Agents to automate workflows without code.

Introducing Sardine Flow: Connect data, APIs, and Agents to automate workflows without code. Sep 11, 2026 In this page Fraud and compliance decisions rarely come down to a single rule or API call. Onboarding a customer, investigating an alert, or resolving a dispute can require multiple data providers, internal rules, AI agents, case management systems, and human reviewers. Most teams connect those steps with custom code, scheduled jobs, and one-off integrations that are difficult to monitor and maintain. Today, Sardine is introducing Sardine Flow, a visual workflow orchestration platform for building, running, and monitoring fraud and compliance processes across Sardine products, third-party data, rules, AI agents, and human review. Flow turns the individual steps behind a risk decision into a connected workflow, so teams do not have to choose between deterministic automation and AI. They can use predictable workflow steps where the process is known, AI agents where investigation or judgment is required, and human review where people need to make the final call. The result is less custom code, greater visibility into how decisions are made, and a faster way to build and improve risk operations. Why Sardine built flow. When Sardine work with fraud and compliance teams, one of the first questions Sardine ask is whether there is a documented SOP for the process. If the answer is yes, much of that work can usually run deterministically. The steps are known, the conditions are defined, and the process can execute consistently without requiring an AI agent for work that is already well understood. But many risk processes are not that clean. They involve ambiguity, investigation, unstructured information, or judgment that can't be fully captured in a predefined workflow. That's where an AI agent is the better fit. In practice, most fraud and compliance operations require both. A single process might combine deterministic checks, AI investigation, external data, and human judgment. And that mix can change over time. A team might start with an agent when the process is poorly defined, then move the stable, repeatable parts into deterministic workflow steps as patterns emerge. That's why Sardine built Sardine Flow: to give teams one place to combine deterministic workflows and AI agents, using each where it makes sense, rather than forcing every risk process into one model of automation. The problem with glue code. Fraud and compliance workflows are rarely simple, and no two businesses run them exactly the same way. The data providers, internal policies, approval steps, and actions involved depend on each company's products, customers, risk appetite, and regulatory requirements. Even a common process like customer onboarding might require a unique combination of identity checks, device intelligence, internal data, risk rules, AI analysis, and human review. Connecting all of those steps usually requires custom code. Teams build individual integrations, scripts, scheduled jobs, and decision logic for each process. As the business changes, that code becomes harder to maintain, monitor, and update. Adding a new vendor or changing a review step can turn into another engineering project. It's a process, usually built once, patched repeatedly, and rarely observable end to end. When something breaks, you're debugging glue code instead of your actual risk strategy. How Sardine Flow works. Sardine Flow gives teams a visual, drag-and-drop builder for assembling the steps behind a fraud or compliance process. A workflow can: * Start from an API request, event, or scheduled task * Call Sardine products and third-party data providers * Apply rules and conditional logic * Invoke an AI agent to investigate or interpret information * Route a case to a human reviewer * Trigger actions in downstream systems * Record each step and its outcome Flow then runs the process consistently and provides visibility into what happened at every step. As Flow has moved into production, Sardine has added more control and visibility for teams operating workflows day to day. Teams can control which nodes are available to different users, see performance and execution stats for each flow, and manage workflows through a more structured interface built for production use. Two things make this different from a one-off script: * Consistent execution. Each workflow defines what information it receives, how each step runs, and what it returns. That makes the process easier to test, monitor, and update than custom glue code. * Support for different timelines. Flow can support low-latency decisions as well as processes that pause while waiting for a vendor response, scheduled event, AI investigation, or human decision. That flexibility matters because risk and compliance work isn't uniformly the same speed. An onboarding or KYC workflow may include automated checks, vendor responses, AI investigation, and human review, with some steps completing immediately and others taking longer. Flow is designed to orchestrate both. Built for real-time and long-running work alike. Because Flow supports different triggers, steps, and timelines, teams can use it across a wide range of fraud and compliance processes: * Customer onboarding and KYC/KYB * Transaction monitoring and risk scoring * Dispute management * Enhanced due diligence * Manual review * Periodic customer reviews * AI-led investigations For example, one neobank customer uses Flow in production to automate its false-positive allowlisting process. Every 15 minutes, the workflow retrieves alerts analysts have cleared as false positives, runs additional checks, and adds customers that meet the required conditions to a custom allowlist. Instead of having an analyst repeat that process manually, Flow runs it consistently and records what happened. Customers are also applying Flow to recurring due diligence reviews and dispute processes that previously required teams to move between multiple systems manually. Rules, AI agents, and people working together. Sardine don't think the future of risk decisioning is rules versus AI. The approach that actually works combines both, plus people, depending on what a given decision needs: * Rules enforce policies, thresholds, and decision logic that must remain consistent * AI agents investigate cases, analyze documents & other unstructured information, and summarize findings * People resolve exceptions and make decisions that require accountability or judgment Flow brings all three into the same process. Every rule result, agent action, and human decision appears as part of one workflow, giving teams a complete view of how an outcome was reached. A useful way to decide where each belongs is to ask how clearly the work can be defined. If a team has a documented, repeatable process, it can usually be represented as a workflow. If the work involves ambiguity, investigation, or unstructured information, an AI agent may be the better fit. The two can also evolve together. A team may initially use an agent to investigate a poorly documented process. As consistent patterns emerge, the predictable parts can be converted into lower-cost workflow steps, while the agent continues handling exceptions and judgment-intensive work. From risk products to a risk operations platform. Every risk process is different, but the underlying building blocks are often the same: data, rules, decisions, reviews, and actions. Sardine Flow makes those building blocks reusable. Teams can connect Sardine capabilities with their own policies, external providers, AI agents, and operational processes without building a new integration for every use case. That gives fraud and compliance teams one place to configure how work gets done, monitor each execution, and improve processes as their risks and policies change. If your team is stitching together vendors, rules, agents, and review steps by hand, contact Sardine to see how Sardine Flow can simplify the infrastructure behind your risk operations.

Brands Review Magazine
Jul 3rd, 2026
Infinite and Sardine announce integration linking compliance, risk, and payments.

Infinite and Sardine announce integration linking compliance, risk, and payments. Infinite, one of the AI-native compliance and payments platforms built for the stablecoin economy, and Sardine, a fraud, risk, and payments platform, recently announced a two-way integration that combines Sardine's real-time fraud and risk intelligence with Infinite's AI-powered compliance platform and account infrastructure. The integration enables Infinite customers to incorporate Sardine's risk signals directly into compliance workflows, while providing Sardine customers with access to account infrastructure designed to support compliant money movement. Together, the companies are helping stablecoin businesses, fintechs, and financial institutions streamline onboarding, strengthen risk management, and simplify payments operations. "As stablecoins become an increasingly important part of the global financial system, businesses need compliance risk infrastructure that can keep pace with the speed and scale of digital access transactions," said Sardine CEO Soups Ranjan. "We're excited to partner with Infinite to help deliver the monitoring, screening and fraud prevention capabilities institutions need to transact with confidence." Smarter compliance decisions. As part of the integration, Infinite now incorporates Sardine's real-time risk intelligence, including device intelligence, behavioral biometrics, transaction risk data, and the patterns Sardine surfaces across its network of financial customers. Infinite combines rules-based controls with AI-powered decisioning to evaluate risk, automate reviews, and determine appropriate next steps, including approvals, escalations, or requests for additional information. By integrating Sardine's signals directly into its compliance workflows, Infinite helps customers make faster, more informed compliance decisions while reducing reliance on manual review processes. Each evaluation generates a comprehensive audit trail that captures the signals reviewed, the rules applied, and the reasoning behind each decision, providing the transparency and explainability required by financial institutions and regulators. A unified foundation for payments. The partnership also brings Infinite Accounts into Sardine's payments platform, giving customers access to a verified, compliance-aware account layer that supports the movement of funds. By connecting account infrastructure, risk intelligence, compliance workflows, and payments operations, the integration reduces operational complexity and helps eliminate friction between customer verification and transaction execution. For customers, the result is a more seamless connection between identity, risk, compliance, and payments, creating a foundation designed for the speed, scale, and global reach of stablecoin transactions. A reunion, not just an integration. As Sardine alumni, Infinite's founders understand first-hand the importance of building proper fraud and financial crime controls into stablecoin infrastructure from the ground up. "There's a reason these two platforms fit together so cleanly. Infinite was founded by Raj, myself, and Krisan, all former Sardine employees," said Nikhil Srinivasan. "We learned the fundamentals of fraud, risk, and compliance inside Sardine, then built Infinite to apply that experience to the stablecoin economy. The shared background is part of why the two platforms integrate so naturally." What's next. Infinite and Sardine plan to expand the integration over time, exploring additional capabilities across onboarding, transaction monitoring, compliance automation, and payments infrastructure as demand for stablecoin-powered financial services continues to grow.