Senior Manager, Payments Risk

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Manager, Payments Risk based in United States.

This is a high-impact leadership role responsible for building and scaling the payments risk function within a rapidly growing SaaS and fintech environment. You’ll own the policies, processes, technology, and decision frameworks that balance fraud prevention, financial protection, regulatory obligations, and exceptional customer experiences. The role has significant influence across merchant onboarding, transaction monitoring, disputes, portfolio losses, and ongoing merchant risk. You’ll partner closely with Legal, Finance, Product, and executive leadership to establish a clear and scalable risk appetite. As the function grows, you’ll have the opportunity to reimagine traditional risk operations through AI-native systems and agentic workflows while maintaining thoughtful human oversight. This is an ideal opportunity for an experienced payments risk professional who thrives in ambiguity, enjoys building from the ground up, and wants to shape a critical business function.

Accountabilities:

• Own the merchant risk policy and operating framework, including onboarding criteria, verification standards, exception handling, escalation paths, and ongoing merchant monitoring.
• Define and evolve the organization’s payments risk appetite in partnership with Legal, Finance, and executive leadership, ensuring decisions appropriately balance growth, customer experience, and financial exposure.
• Own portfolio loss analysis and risk reporting, tracking metrics such as loss rates, approval rates, time-to-decision, dispute performance, and win rates while supporting budgeting and forecasting for expected losses.
• Develop and manage the transaction monitoring strategy, including risk rules, flags, review processes, thresholds, decision times, and false-positive reduction.
• Establish the dispute strategy and identify opportunities to improve dispute win rates while implementing preventative measures that reduce disputes before they occur.
• Exercise decision-making authority over escalations, account holds, and merchant offboarding, while recognizing situations requiring executive or legal approval.
• Identify fraudulent or deteriorating merchant behavior through strong risk judgment, data analysis, and a deep understanding of payments patterns.
• Partner with Legal and executive stakeholders to address card network and payment platform compliance obligations and ensure merchants understand their responsibilities.
• Lead the systems and tooling strategy for payments risk, rethinking manual processes through AI-native capabilities, automation, and agentic workflows while maintaining appropriate human intervention for complex or sensitive decisions.
• Build and continuously improve the payments risk function, establishing scalable people, processes, technology, reporting, and governance as the business grows.

Requirements:

• Bring 6+ years of experience in payments risk, ideally including leadership or highly cross-functional responsibilities within an embedded payments environment where the platform carries financial liability.
• Demonstrate strong expertise across payments, including acquiring, merchant underwriting, chargebacks, transaction monitoring, fraud prevention, and related risk disciplines.
• Have hands-on experience with Stripe, particularly Stripe Connect, or a comparable payments platform, with a clear understanding of platform capabilities, limitations, and risk responsibilities.
• Be capable of creating practical risk policies that teams can consistently follow while communicating difficult decisions clearly, professionally, and empathetically to customers.
• Possess strong data and analytical skills, with the ability to independently develop reporting and derive insights rather than relying entirely on dedicated analytics resources; experience with SQL, Stripe Sigma, or similar tools is a plus.
• Demonstrate sound judgment and a strong instinct for distinguishing legitimate merchants from fraudulent or increasingly risky accounts.
• Be comfortable operating as the primary owner of a function initially, with the motivation and capability to build a broader payments risk organization over time.
• Bring excellent communication, decision-making, stakeholder management, and problem-solving skills, with the resilience and adaptability required to operate effectively in a fast-growing environment.
• Demonstrate an AI-forward mindset and willingness to rethink traditional risk operations through automation, AI, and agentic workflows while understanding where human judgment remains essential.
• Candidates who do not meet every qualification but are strongly motivated by the opportunity are encouraged to apply.

Benefits:

• Annual salary range of $156,000-$253,500 USD, reflecting the opportunity for substantial growth as skills, impact, and proficiency develop.
• Typical new hires join at the accomplished stage, with an expected annual salary of approximately $185,300 USD.
• A compensation philosophy focused on paying for growth, with regular career development conversations and opportunities for compensation progression as responsibilities and contributions increase.
• Comprehensive benefits designed to support employees’ health, financial wellbeing, and overall quality of life.
• Remote-first work environment with no hybrid requirement, supporting collaboration across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
• Opportunity to build and shape a critical payments risk function within a high-growth SaaS and fintech environment.
• Significant autonomy and ownership, with the opportunity to influence risk strategy, business growth, customer experience, and operational infrastructure.
• Exposure to modern AI, automation, and agentic workflows as part of the evolution of payments risk operations.
• Collaborative culture emphasizing adaptability, resilience, learning agility, humility, transparency, and continuous improvement.
• Career development opportunities in an environment where employees are encouraged to take meaningful ownership and make a measurable impact.