Senior Intelligence Analyst, Iran Focus in London

The R&D team at Chainalysis is inspired by solving the hardest technical challenges and building products that establish trust in cryptocurrencies. We're a global organization that thrives on challenging work and doing it alongside exceptionally talented teammates. Our industry evolves rapidly, and our mission is to build a flexible, AI-driven platform that automates entity resolution, optimizes data labeling pipelines, and creates predictive models that identify illicit patterns before they accelerate. Our data and solutions have been used to solve some of the world's most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely.

The Global Intelligence Team produces the attribution at the heart of that data — connecting on-chain activity to the real-world entities behind it, across the global crypto ecosystem. It’s the intelligence data moat beneath every Chainalysis product, and what investigators, sanctions authorities, and national-security agencies rely on to follow the money and disrupt threats. Few threats test that mission harder than Iran. Through the IRGC and its Qods Force, a network of proxies and Shia militant groups, state-linked cyber actors, and a sprawling sanctions-evasion apparatus, the Islamic Republic has turned to cryptocurrency to raise, move, and launder value beyond the reach of the traditional financial system.

As our Iran-focused intelligence analyst — the team’s subject-matter expert on Iran and the IRGC — you’ll own that problem end to end. This is a depth role: while our analysts cover the breadth of the crypto-services ecosystem, you’ll go deep on a single, high-stakes domain — becoming the person, inside Chainalysis and increasingly across the industry, who understands how Iran and its proxies use crypto and can prove it on-chain.

In this role, you’ll:

• Own Iran attribution end to end — the threat-actor entities, their definitions, and the accounts, addresses, and infrastructure they operate.
• Lead the attribution response to Iran-related sanctions events — drive the rapid, high-visibility on-chain attribution that turns those designations into coverage in our data.
• Map the networks on-chain — trace how Iranian actors raise, move, launder, and cash out value through various channels.
• Produce finished intelligence — advisory notes, customer and partner briefings, and contributions to flagship publications that make the Iran crypto threat legible and actionable.
• Be the named external expert — represent Chainalysis on Iran crypto threats at conferences, on panels, with the press, and in briefings to public- and private-sector partners.
• Help set the Iran collection agenda — surface what data we need on Iranian networks and feed those requirements into our collection process.
• Translate typologies into detection — turn what you learn about Iranian methods into guidance that our products and our customers can operationalize.
• Build with AI — design and tune the automation that scales your analysis and the team’s.
• Level up the team — raise the bar on Iran and threat-finance tradecraft broadly.

We’re looking for candidates who have:

• Deep, demonstrable Iran expertise — real command of the IRGC and IRGC-Qods Force, Iran’s proxy and Shia militant landscape, and Iranian sanctions evasion.
• On-chain tracing ability against Iranian targets — direct experience following Iranian crypto activity on-chain.
• A national-security or threat-finance background — intelligence, sanctions, counter-threat-finance, or investigations.
• Regional fluency — a strong grasp of Iranian geopolitics and regional financial flows.
• Elite potential and a proven track record — exceptional aptitude, judgment, and work ethic.
• Excellent writing and communication — this is an outward-facing expert role.
• AI-forward instincts — you build automation to scale your work and others’.
• Comfort working with data; blockchain forensics experience strongly preferred.
• 5+ years of relevant analytic, intelligence, or threat-finance experience for a Senior hire; 8+ years and recognized domain authority for a Staff hire.

You might also have:

• Farsi language ability.
• Direct experience with OFAC sanctions, terror-finance designations, or the designation process.
• A record of published research or public speaking on Iran, sanctions evasion, or crypto threat finance.
• Familiarity with Iranian exchange infrastructure, crypto mining as a sanctions-evasion vector, or dual-use procurement networks.

At Chainalysis, we believe that diversity of experience and thought makes us stronger. We’re ensuring we keep learning by committing to continually revisit and reevaluate our diversity culture. We encourage applicants across any race, ethnicity, gender/gender expression, age, spirituality, ability, experience and more.