Managing Director, Audits (New York)

About the job

Clusia is led by Reed Switzer, founder of Hopscotch, a B2B payments startup acquired by Avalara / Vista Equity Partners, and Nolan Hendrickson, who previously led engineering teams within Microsoft's Defender organization. The company is venture-backed and has not yet been publicly announced.

Company Description

The next great compliance firm will be a software company. We're building it.

Compliance is one of the largest opportunities hiding in plain sight. There are 500,000+ compliance officers in the U.S. representing $40B+ in annual labor spend — and companies spend billions more on audits, consultants, and outsourced reviews. Every dollar of it is required. And nearly all of it is still delivered the way it was thirty years ago: scattered systems, spreadsheets, email threads, and manual follow-up.

We deliver that work differently. Software drafts it from the customer's own data, with every answer cited to its source — and accredited professionals review, decide, and sign. Our ambition is to become the AI-native compliance firm.

Role Description

We're hiring a Managing Director to lead our audit business unit — starting with the annual ACH audit every originator owes Nacha, and expanding from there.

This is not an oversight-from-a-distance role. You'll own the unit's P&L and growth, and you'll be in the work: reviewing and signing full-service audits, co-developing and continuously improving our audit methodology alongside our engineering and AI teams, and building custom self-assessment workbooks and audits with sponsor banks based on their risk profiles. You'll also own the industry side of the business — developing distribution relationships with banks, payments associations, and compliance partners that feed the unit's pipeline.

You'll have real authority: control over the unit, a budget to grow the team as revenue scales, and a direct hand in shaping how audits get delivered for the next decade. Your judgment won't just decide engagements — it trains the software that makes every subsequent engagement faster and sharper.

Note: New York City preferred. You are required to sign what you'd stake your name on — because you will be.

Why Join

• Compliance tech is next up. We believe compliance is entering the same transformation legal tech has seen over the last two years: large, high-stakes workflows being rebuilt around AI, collaboration, and better systems of record.

• You'd be the practitioner‑founder. Engineers are building the machine; you'd be the accredited professional who decides what it must live up to. Few people ever get to encode decades of audit judgment into something that scales.

• A real business from day one. Audits are required spend with a hard annual deadline — this unit sells something every ACH originator in America must buy, and you own the revenue line.

• You'll work with founders who have done this before. The founding team has built and sold venture-backed companies in the past and is applying those lessons to build Clusia with focus, urgency, and ambition.

Qualifications

• AAP accreditation required. Additional credentials — APRP, NCP, CAMS, CRCM, or CIA — are a strong plus.

• 10+ years in ACH compliance, payments risk, or audit — at a financial institution, payments association, audit firm, or consultancy.

• You've built audits, not just passed them. Hands‑on experience developing audit programs, questionnaires, testing procedures, and workpapers.

• Comfortable signing. You've reviewed and signed (or been the final reviewer on) audits and understand exactly what that signature means.

• Business ownership. You've run a P&L, a practice, or a book of business — or you're clearly ready to — and you want to be measured on growth, not activity.

• A network that shows up. Relationships across sponsor banks, payments associations, and the ACH ecosystem that turn into pipeline, partnerships, and hires.

• Builder energy. You've been frustrated by how audits get done for years and have opinions about how they should work. This is the job where those opinions become the product.