Fraud Intelligence Lead

Plaid; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 149,000 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Dental benefits

Vision benefits

401(k)

Job summary

Plaid is seeking an Fraud Intelligence Lead to build and run a small, high-leverage team that handles live casework across Protect, IDV, and Payments/ACH. You’ll hire, coach, and stay close to investigations, stepping in for SEV response as needed.

You will partner with Data Science, ML/AI, and Product to improve signals and features, while monitoring external threat trends and maintaining escalation paths with legal and regulatory bodies.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of applied fraud experience in a high-velocity environment (fintech, consumer payments, banking, SaaS, marketplace risk, or security research).
• Investigator mindset: pattern synthesis, hypothesis testing, and skilled triage between signal and noise.
• End-to-end investigation experience reconstructing attacker intent and behavior in multi-step attack sequences across accounts, devices, and identities.
• Post-containment incident response experience with a deep emphasis on post-mortems and root cause analysis.
• Dark and grey-web navigation and investigation experience; ability to assess source credibility and translate external intelligence into actionable insights.
• Strong communication: ability to explain complex, ambiguous behavior to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Tool fluency with data environments and investigative toolchains (BI tools, anomaly detection, case trackers).
• SQL for deep data querying and exploratory analysis.
• Python for scripting, rapid prototyping, and analytical workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead investigations into complex fraud cases across identities, accounts, devices, and transaction surfaces.
• Build and lead a small, high-leverage Fraud Intelligence team and coach analysts.
• Collaborate with Data Science, ML/AI, and Product teams to improve labeling, feature sets, evaluation frameworks, and model decay monitoring.
• Surface data quality limitations and systematically formalize missing features.
• Translate exploratory research into reusable feature pipelines, model inputs, or rule augmentations.
• Participate in product discovery, roadmap planning, and post-launch evaluation to ensure fraud-awareness by design.
• Bridge investigation outcomes to product and model improvements.
• Report team health, casework trends, and emerging risks to the Head of Fraud.

Skills

Fraud experience

Investigation mindset

End-to-end investigation

Post-incident response

Dark web intelligence

Strong communication

Investigation tools

SQL

Python

Tools

BI tools

Anomaly detection

Case trackers

Job description

We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam. Our Fraud Intelligence team's mission is to turn fraud signals into insight that our EPD teams transform into improvements across Protect, IDV, Signal, and Guaranteed Payments. We believe transaction patterns, device signals, identity linkages, and behavioral data are dramatically underleveraged tools in fraud prevention, and we ground our products in what adversaries are actually doing right now. As the Fraud Intelligence Lead, you will build and run a small, high-leverage team of Fraud Intelligence Analysts (and eventually a Staff Researcher) responsible for live casework across Protect, IDV, and Payments/ACH. You'll operate as a player-coach, hiring and coaching your team while staying close enough to the work to personally pick up casework and SEV response when needed.

Responsibilities

Team Building & People Leadership

• Set the casework quality bar: define what rigorous investigation, triage, and reporting look like for the team
• Coach analysts on investigation technique, pattern synthesis, and translating findings into product/model input

Operating Model & Cross-PA Partnership

• Own coverage allocation across the Protect/IDV and Payments/ACH pods, including flexing assignments as volume shifts
• Manage matrixed staffing and time allocation clearly between the Fraud PA and Payments PA
• Represent the Fraud Intelligence team in product and model roadmap discussions, translating casework patterns into strategic priorities

Reporting & Escalation

• Report team health, casework trends, and emerging risks to the Head of Fraud
• Own escalation paths for SEVs and incidents requiring legal, law enforcement, or regulatory involvement

Live Fraud Investigation & Reconstruction

• Lead investigations into complex fraud cases across identities, accounts, devices, and transaction surfaces
• Provide support to day-to-day fraud operations including SEVs and alert triage
• Reconstruct attacker sequences and hypothesize actor intent and tooling
• Distill patterns from noisy signals into clear narratives and actionable insights
• Bridge investigation outcomes to product and model improvements

Product & Model Partnership

• Collaborate with Data Science, ML/AI, and Product teams to improve labeling, feature sets, evaluation frameworks, and model decay monitoring
• Surface data quality limitations and systematically formalize missing features
• Translate exploratory research into reusable feature pipelines, model inputs, or rule augmentations
• Participate in product discovery, roadmap planning, and post-launch evaluation to ensure fraud-awareness by design

Ecosystem Monitoring & Knowledge Leadership

• Continuously survey external fraud trends, adversary techniques, tooling, and emerging threat vectors
• Proactively perform threat modeling of abuse surfaces and initiate research proposals when patterns emerge

Qualifications

• 5+ years of applied fraud experience in a high-velocity environment (fintech, consumer payments, banking, SaaS, marketplace risk, or security research)
• Investigator mindset: pattern synthesis, hypothesis testing, and skilled triage between signal and noise
• End-to-end investigation experience reconstructing attacker intent and behavior in multi-step attack sequences across accounts, devices, and identities
• Post-containment incident response experience with a deep emphasis on post-mortems and root cause analysis
• Dark and grey-web navigation and investigation experience; ability to assess source credibility and translate external intelligence into actionable insights
• Strong communication: ability to explain complex, ambiguous behavior to technical and non-technical audiences
• Tool fluency with data environments and investigative toolchains (BI tools, anomaly detection, case trackers)
• SQL for deep data querying and exploratory analysis
• Python for scripting, rapid prototyping, and analytical workflows

Preferred

• Graph/network analysis experience to detect linked behavioral structures or actor networks
• Familiarity with rule engines, signal gating, and large-scale monitoring systems
• Experience applying AI tools and agents to accelerate investigations and research workflows
• Ability to translate fraud research into actionable signals, rules, or labeled datasets that improve model performance

Nice to Have

• Fraud domain certifications (e.g., CFE)
• Prior work on consumer identity, payments, or risk platform development
• Exposure to production ML model lifecycles and metrics for drift/decay
• Experience improving internal fraud tooling, automation, or case management systems

Our mission at Plaid is to unlock financial freedom for everyone. To support that mission, we seek to build a diverse team of driven individuals who care deeply about making the financial ecosystem more equitable. We recognize that strong qualifications can come from both prior work experiences and lived experiences. We encourage you to apply to a role even if your experience doesn't fully match the job description. We are always looking for team members that will bring something unique to Plaid!

Plaid is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, ethnicity, religion or religious belief, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, military or veteran status, disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Plaid is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance with your application or interviews due to a disability, please let us know at [e-mail].

Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice here.

Additional compensation in the form(s) of equity and/or commission are dependent on the position offered. Plaid provides a comprehensive benefit plan, including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k). Pay is based on factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience and skillset, and location. Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefit plans.

Compensation Range: $148.8K - $232.8K