Director, Payments Risk

Ignition; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Ignition is seeking a Director of Payments Risk to own risk strategy, governance, and the operating system behind scalable risk management for a high‑growth payments platform.

You will lead the team responsible for day‑to‑day risk execution, partner across product, engineering, and Finance, and drive automation to protect customers while enabling responsible growth.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in payments/fintech or related field.
• Experience leading teams and delivering outcomes.
• Strong understanding of payments risk, fraud controls, and monitoring.

Responsibilities

• Define risk strategy and coverage; shape roadmap with VP of Payments.
• Run day-to-day risk operations; manage incident readiness and playbooks.
• Partner with product, engineering, Finance/Data to align on dashboards and forecasts.
• Lead automation initiatives; scale tooling and AI-enabled controls.

Skills

Payments/FinTech

Team leadership

Stripe fundamentals

Fraud & risk

Automation

Data‑driven decisions

Tools

AI tooling

Job description

Who we are:

Founded in 2013, Ignition is the leading revenue and billing automation platform for firms and agencies. We automate proposals, invoicing, payments and workflows in a single AI-powered platform, empowering businesses to sell, bill and get paid faster.

Ignition automates proposals, engagement letters, invoicing, payments and workflows in a single AI-powered platform, empowering 8,500+ businesses to sell, bill and get paid for their services with ease.

To date, Ignition customers have managed relationships with over 2.4 million clients and earned $13b in revenue via the platform. Ignition's global workforce spans Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Philippines, US and the UK.

Company Values:

• We are better everyday

• We work without ego

• We are smarter together

• We hero our customer

About the Role

Payments is one of Ignition’s biggest, highest-stakes, and fastest-scaling areas - shaping how tens of thousands of professional services get paid. With that scale comes complexity, ambiguity, and risk. We’re looking for a leader who can bring trust, clarity, and decisiveness to it.

As Director of Payments Risk, you’ll own the engine that helps Ignition grow boldly and responsibly. Reporting to the VP of Payments, you’ll own the risk agenda and build the operating system behind it: the people, processes, and technology that enable scalable, balanced risk management without compromising the exceptional experience Ignition delivers every day.

You’ll lead the team responsible for day-to-day risk execution while setting the strategy for where the function goes next. You’ll bring a clear point of view on the risks we face, how to prioritize and address them, and what they mean for the business.

This is a role for an autonomous, systems-minded leader who can see around corners, create structure in a fast-moving environment, and make decisive calls when the path isn’t obvious. Your work will protect Ignition and its customers while giving the business the confidence to keep moving forward.

What You’ll Do

Risk Strategy & Coverage

• Develop your own point of view on risk strategy — where the function needs to go, what risks matter most, and how we address them — and collaborate with the VP of Payments to shape it into the roadmap.

• Define risk coverage for new capabilities ahead of launch: identify the risks introduced as the product set broadens, design controls and monitoring, and set success criteria.

• Evolve our risk appetite and control frameworks; know when to tighten and when to give room based on what the data and the business need.

• Proactively look for how risk can increase customer value and drive business growth, not just protect against downside.

Execution & Operations

• Run the day-to-day: own the team’s queue and escalation workflow, make the call on cases the playbook doesn’t cover, and maintain the operating rhythm that keeps the function tight.

• Get hands-on when it counts — tune rules, review cases when patterns shift, and treat false positives and missed catches as signal to improve the system.

• Own incident readiness — build and maintain the playbooks, escalation paths, and decision frameworks your team executes when fraud spikes, new attack vectors, or processing anomalies surface.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner with product and engineering to build risk requirements into the roadmap, and with Finance/Data to build dashboards and reporting that serve as the single source of truth.

• Track portfolio-level losses and supply the risk perspective that informs forecasting, business cases, and decisions on launches, pricing, and partners.

• Act as the internal champion for payments risk — help non-specialist teams understand how risk affects their roles in selling, supporting, and operating our payments capabilities.

Automation & Team

• Design for scale — make AI and tooling the default so the team manages exceptions, not volume. Continuously test new tools and raise the bar for AI-forward payments risk.

• Develop and coach the Risk team — set a high bar, build capability, and foster a culture where the team takes initiative and owns its outcomes.

What You’ll Bring

• 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 strong Stripe fundamentals (or comparable infrastructure). Embedded payments at a software platform that carries liability is what we're really after.

• 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.

Compensation Information:

Our salary bands are designed to reflect the range of skills and experience needed for the position and to allow room for growth. The final offer amount for this role will be dependent on state/location, applicable experience, and skillset of the candidate.

This role has a minimum annual base of CAD $170,000 and maximum annual salary of CAD $190,000 in Canada / USD $160,000 and maximum annual salary of USD $190,000 in the United States.

We may use AI enabled tools to support parts of our recruitment process, such as improving efficiency in scheduling and note taking. These tools are used responsibly and never replace human decision‑making, all hiring decisions are made by our people.

We aim to keep the process transparent, respectful of your time, and as smooth as possible.

Ignition is an equal opportunity employer. If you require accommodations during the recruitment process or need materials in an alternative format, please contact [e-mail].