Director of Payments, Risk

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California.

📋 Description

• Take charge of the fraud risk strategy and the comprehensive defense architecture throughout the payments ecosystem: encompassing vendor risk engines, internal controls, processor-level gates, and partner-bank requirements, along with a current map detailing which system makes which decision.

• Manage the detection portfolio as a systematic approach: calibrating rules, thresholds, models, and velocity limits against quantified trade-offs between false positives and fraud capture, with rigorous change control and post-change monitoring.

• Oversee the economics of the chargeback and dispute program: delivering strategy, pre-dispute deflection signals (Ethoca, Verifi RDR, Compelling Evidence 3.0), reporting on win rates and net recoveries, and maintaining oversight of card-network monitoring.

• Direct fraud investigations and incident response with an evidence-first methodology: reconstructing the decision trail across vendor logs, application telemetry, and processor responses before assigning a resolution; differentiating system defects from legitimate controls; defending valid declines against pressures to reverse; and transforming incidents into sustainable solutions.

• Design and govern AI-driven risk operations: establishing agentic workflows for queue triage, decline forensics, fraud-ring detection, chargeback evidence assembly, and ongoing monitoring, with governance mechanisms in place (QA gates before any external releases, human-in-the-loop checkpoints on account-level actions, auditable reasoning trails, and defined boundaries on automation decisions).

• Build and nurture the team: recruit, mentor, and develop risk analysts and scientists, training them to operate and enhance AI-assisted workflows, with documentation and runbooks regarded as essential deliverables.

• Propel root-cause resolutions throughout the entire payment flow and customer journey: if a risk gap exists in another team’s system (compliance workflows, account lifecycle, internal tools), lead the campaign to address it there rather than compensating downstream, and collaborate closely with compliance on the fraud/AML interface.

• Manage the vendor and partner ecosystem at both operational and commercial levels: hands-on (rules, integrations, data quality) and strategic (SLAs, escalation paths, roadmap influence), while aligning risk posture with processors, sponsor banks, and platform partners.

• With a proactive approach, report to executives on key risk mitigation strategies to lower risk exposure and loss, performance and risk metrics, going beyond surface-level fraud rates: analyzing loss by channel, decline precision and false-positive costs, dispute win rates, automation coverage, and time-to-disposition, linking risk decisions to profitability.

⛳️ Requirements

• 8+ years in payments risk, fraud, or dispute operations within financial services or cryptocurrency, including 3+ years leading a risk, fraud, or trust and safety function, ideally at a crypto exchange or on/off-ramp.

• In-depth knowledge of payments and fraud: understanding card-rail mechanics (authorization and decline flows), chargeback and representment economics, Visa and Mastercard dispute rules, card-network monitoring programs, working knowledge of ACH and real-time rails, and fluency in crypto-side risk (wallet behavior, on-chain flows, cash-out typologies).

• Platform proficiency: Extensive hands-on experience with modern fraud prevention platforms (Sardine, SEON, Sift, Kount, Forter, or similar), including rule creation, shadow versus live testing, and the ability to reverse-engineer rule functionality rather than relying solely on its label.

• Data literacy: Proficient in SQL with a strong comfort level in log and observability platforms and analytics tools; capable of addressing questions independently without waiting for an analyst.

• AI-native leadership: Experience in building or governing AI-assisted operational workflows, with the ability to discuss specific automation, established guardrails, and areas retained for human oversight. Aptitude will be evaluated in a working session.

• Institution building: Ability to document, cross-train, and create systems that endure beyond your tenure; ensuring that the functions you establish continue to operate effectively in your absence.

• Influence: Capability to modify processes not under your ownership, addressing root causes in other teams’ systems rather than implementing permanent workarounds.

• People leadership: Proven track record of hiring, developing, and retaining analysts, with the capacity to guide a team through AI-driven transformations in workflow methodologies.

• Sound judgment: Commitment to evidence-based decision-making over convenient narratives, prioritizing conservative and defensible metrics over overly optimistic ones, balancing the protection of good customers with the need to address fraud losses, and ensuring clear communication with both technical and executive stakeholders.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health insurance

• 401(k) matching

• Flexible work hours

• Paid time off

• Remote work options