Engineering Manager — CoCounsel Tax

🏢 The Company

Our client is a long-established, family-owned fiduciary and trust services group headquartered in Singapore, now led at board level by its second generation. Working alongside private bankers and external asset managers, the group structures and administers trusts for ultra-high-net-worth families. Rather than holding client deposits like a private bank, it safeguards and manages family wealth sitting outside investment portfolios.

The group operates across several international jurisdictions in Asia Pacific, the Pacific and the Americas. Singapore is the hub: it is the largest office and sets group-wide compliance policy. The global compliance function numbers around a dozen people, with a dedicated compliance lead in each location. The framework is well embedded and running as business-as-usual, so this is a chance to strengthen and refine it rather than build from scratch.

📋 Responsibilities

• Act as a key contributor to group-level compliance from the Singapore head office, helping shape and maintain policies that apply across all jurisdictions (reporting into the head of compliance)
• Track new and changing regulatory requirements, assess their impact on existing frameworks, and keep policies and procedures current through a structured annual refresh
• Own the end-to-end AML/CFT lifecycle for trust clients:
• new client onboarding, periodic and trigger-based KYC reviews
• transaction monitoring, investigations and escalation of suspicious activity
• incident reporting and handling of policy exceptions
• Help offices across the group run the enterprise-wide ML/TF risk assessment, from refining the methodology to analysing results, setting remediation plans and preparing board-level reporting
• Manage FATCA and CRS obligations for group and client entities: entity classification, self-certifications, registrations, reportable account submissions, quality-assurance sampling and fixing gaps
• Advise offices on personal data protection, deliver staff training, and test controls as part of the second line of defence
• Design and deliver compliance awareness training, and raise the standard of internal documentation and meeting records
• Carry out compliance monitoring and thematic reviews, then present findings and practical recommendations to senior leadership and the board
• Produce monthly management information on compliance activity, backed by robust data tracking
• Coordinate regulator, auditor and independent reviewer engagements, including information requests, inspections and remediation, and track actions through to closure
• Contribute to wider group compliance projects as priorities evolve

✅ Requirements

• Around 4–6 years of compliance experience within a financial institution. A background in trust, fiduciary or private banking is strongly preferred.
• Hands-on depth in client due diligence on complex, high-net-worth structures, including verifying source of wealth and source of funds
• Working knowledge of FATCA/CRS and data protection obligations
• Comfortable operating in a multi-jurisdictional environment and working with colleagues across time zones
• A confident, clear communicator who can partner with business teams and hold their own with senior stakeholders and board members
• Organised and deadline-driven, able to manage multiple workstreams and report progress concisely