Director of Payments Risk: Strategy, Trust & Scale

Ignition; United States; Remote; USD 160,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Ignition is seeking a Director of Payments Risk to own and propel the risk engine for our payments platform. You will lead a high-impact function that enables scalable, balanced risk management while delivering a superb customer experience.

This role requires autonomy, strategic thinking, and hands-on execution across risk strategy, controls, and cross-functional partnerships. You’ll partner with product, engineering, and finance to embed risk into roadmaps, build dashboards, and maintain

Qualifications

• 8+ years in payments and/or fintech, including 3+ years leading teams and owning outcomes.
• Deep, hands-on command of the payments stack — onboarding, underwriting, processing, settlement, reconciliation, and disputes — with Stripe fundamentals (or comparable infrastructure).
• A track record in fraud and risk — building or running detection, monitoring, and controls; balancing loss prevention against customer experience and growth.
• Commercially minded — you understand how risk decisions affect growth, and your instinct is to enable it, not stifle it. You can build the reporting leadership relies on to make informed decisions.
• Automation-first — you have stood up new processes or products and treat AI and tooling as genuine force multipliers.
• High autonomy, sound judgment, and meticulous attention to detail — you think in systems, run without day-to-day guidance, and get the details right in a domain where a missed edge case has real financial consequences.
• A clear communicator who translates payments and risk complexity into guidance non-specialist teams can act on.

Responsibilities

• Define risk strategy and shape it into the roadmap with the VP of Payments.
• Define risk coverage for new capabilities before launch and set success criteria.
• Evolve risk appetite and control frameworks based on data and business needs.
• Own the day-to-day risk execution and incident readiness, including playbooks and escalation paths.
• Partner with product/engineering to build risk requirements into roadmaps and with Finance/Data for dashboards.
• Track portfolio-level losses and provide risk perspectives for forecasting and launches.
• Act as internal champion for payments risk across selling, supporting, and operating roles.
• Design for scale by making AI/tools the default and coaching the Risk team.

Skills

Payments leadership

Fintech experience

Fraud risk management

Communication

Autonomy

Tools

Stripe fundamentals

Job description

Ignition is seeking a Director of Payments Risk to own and propel the risk engine for our payments platform. You will lead a high-impact function that enables scalable, balanced risk management while delivering a superb customer experience.

This role requires autonomy, strategic thinking, and hands-on execution across risk strategy, controls, and cross-functional partnerships. You’ll partner with product, engineering, and finance to embed risk into roadmaps, build dashboards, and maintain