Head of Risk - FinTech

Truss is a regulated fintech: real bank accounts, real money movement, cards, payables, receivables. Risk is not a side quest. Truss is a regulated fintech: real bank accounts, real money movement, cards, payables, receivables. Risk is not a side quest. We\'re hiring the founding head of risk: a person who has built the risk algorithms and rules engines at new fintech companies — the ones that actually catch fraud, abuse, and credit/ops blowups in production — and who wants to do it again as a leader of the function, not a seat inside someone else\'s. We\'re looking for people who have shipped rules engines, graph/feature pipelines, velocity checks, device and identity signals, manual-review queues, and model-assisted decisioning at places like Venmo, Cash App, or peer fintechs that grew up the hard way . Not "I advised on a fraud roadmap." Not "I sat next to the risk team at a mega-bank." What You'll Actually Do Build the risk function that underpins the product. Rules engines, decisioning flows, scoring, policy creation, case management and the machinery that decides who gets an account, who gets paid, who gets a card limit, and who gets stopped. You design it, you help ship it with engineering, iterate on it, and own the outcomes.
Own fraud and abuse end-to-end. Account takeover, synthetic identity, payment fraud, check fraud, mule activity, promo/referral abuse, friendly fraud, first-party abuse. You sit with the people who ship ledger, payments, onboarding, and cards.
Tune for a real business, not a demo. False positives kill good contractors. BSA/AML and OFAC-aware controls, KYC/KYB quality, transaction monitoring posture, SAR-relevant patterns, bank-partner and sponsor expectations — coordinated with compliance, not outsourced to them.
What We're Looking For You\'ve built production risk / fraud systems at a high-growth fintech or payments company — non-negotiable. Rules engines, decisioning platforms, feature stores, graph or link analysis, velocity and device signals, model + rules hybrids. Venmo / Cash App / Stripe / Block / Marqeta / similar caliber experience is the reference class.
You\'ve done it when the company was still early or scaling hard — messy data, incomplete identity, attackers iterating weekly.
ACH, wires, checks, cards, account funding, payouts, ledger edge cases.
You can reason about precision/recall, dollar-weighted loss, segment-level risk, and rule interactions.
You make the call, ship the control, and watch the metric.
Fluent with modern tooling (SQL, rules/events stacks, AI as a lever). We\'re a small, technical company.
Nice to Haves Direct experience with sponsor banks, program managers, or card issuers and the controls they demand.
You\'ve owned or deeply partnered on AML transaction monitoring, sanctions, or KYC/KYB quality.
Incident leadership: a real fraud event, a bank partner fire drill, or a loss spike you diagnosed and fixed.
Enough code to be dangerous (Python/SQL/TypeScript) — you prototype ideas quickly.

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