Principal Risk Analyst

As a Principal Risk Analyst, you'll identify, measure, and mitigate the risks that come with operating a crypto payments business, including counterparty exposure, liquidity and market risk, and the technical risks unique to blockchain rails. You'll work with Product, Engineering, Compliance, Treasury, and Operations to make sure we can grow quickly without taking risks we don't understand.

What You'll Do

• Review & challenge risk assessment across our payment flows, including on-ramps, off-ramps, card and bank funding, stablecoin settlement, and cross-border transfers.

• Assess and monitor counterparty risk across liquidity providers, exchanges, custodians, banking partners, payment processors, and blockchain infrastructure vendors.

• Evaluate exposure from cross-chain bridges, DEX swaps, and smart contract interactions, including protocol risk, liquidity depth, slippage, and settlement failure.

• Review & challenge risks related to crypto trading, including price slippage, execution latency, and hedging liquidity across venues.

• Work with Treasury on market, liquidity, and FX risk, including hedging strategy, inventory and float management, and stablecoin de-peg scenarios.

• Provide an independent review of new product proposals, collaborating early with Product and Engineering, ensuring all risks are identified and controls are integrated from inception, and recommending approval with or without conditions.

• Review business continuity testing and business impact analyses to ensure operational resilience and preparedness for disruptions.

• Develop, maintain, and evolve the risk framework, with a strong focus on defining and embedding Risk Appetite Statements and Key Risk Indicators (KRIs), alongside risk registers, limits, and escalation procedures.

• Review technology and information security risks across core systems, infrastructure, and third-party integrations to ensure robust safeguards and data protection.

• Prepare risk reporting for senior leadership, the board, auditors, and partners

• Conduct third-party risk assessments and continuous monitoring for critical vendors, service providers, and partners.

What You'll Bring

Experience

• 5-10 years in risk management at a payments company, fintech, exchange, bank, or crypto firm.

• Hands-on experience with credit/counterparty, operational, or market risk in a regulated or high-growth environment.

• Strong quantitative and analytical skills. You are comfortable building dashboards and models from raw data.

Crypto payments knowledge (essential)

• A deep understanding of how crypto payments work end to end: fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat flows, crypto swaps, stablecoin settlement, merchant and card acquiring,

• Working knowledge of blockchain fundamentals: consensus, finality, confirmations, reorgs, gas and fees, wallets, and key management.

• Understanding of cross-chain bridges and their trust and security models, plus the history of bridge exploits.

• Understanding of swaps, DEXs and AMMs, liquidity pools, slippage, MEV, and aggregator routing.

• Knowledge of hedging approaches in crypto, such as spot, perpetuals, futures, options, and stablecoin basis risk.

• Familiarity with stablecoin mechanics and reserve and de-peg risk, and with smart contract risk and audits.

• Experience with blockchain analytics tools (e.g., Chainalysis, TRM, Elliptic) and on-chain data exploration.

Core skills

• Excellent judgment under uncertainty. You can make a call with incomplete information and explain your reasoning.

• Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to translate technical risk into business impact for non-specialists.

• A collaborative approach: you can say "no" or "yes, with conditions" without becoming a blocker.

Nice to Have

• A professional risk certification (FRM, PRM, CAMS) or a quantitative degree.

• Experience in DeFi or familiarity with writing or reading simple smart contract logic.

• Prior experience building a risk function at a scaling company.