Fraud Intelligence Lead — Live Investigations & Strategy

Plaid; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401(k)

Job summary

Plaid is seeking an experienced Fraud Intelligence Lead to build and run a high-leverage team of analysts, responsible for live casework across Protect, IDV, and Payments/ACH. You will hire, coach, and stay close to investigations while guiding squad priorities and improvements.

You will partner with Data Science, ML/AI, and Product teams to improve labeling, features, and model health, while reporting on team health and emerging risks to leadership.

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
• Preferred: Familiarity with rule engines, signal gating, and large-scale monitoring systems
• Preferred: Experience applying AI tools and agents to accelerate investigations and research workflows
• Nice to Have: Fraud domain certifications (e.g., CFE)
• Nice to Have: Prior work on consumer identity, payments, or risk platform development
• Nice to Have: Exposure to production ML model lifecycles and metrics for drift/decay
• Nice to Have: Experience improving internal fraud tooling, automation, or case management systems

Responsibilities

• Lead live 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
• 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
• 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

Skills

Investigator mindset

Pattern synthesis

SQL

Python

Strong communication

Data tool proficiency

Team leadership

Tools

BI tools

Anomaly detection

Case trackers

Graph/network analysis

Job description

Plaid is seeking an experienced Fraud Intelligence Lead to build and run a high-leverage team of analysts, responsible for live casework across Protect, IDV, and Payments/ACH. You will hire, coach, and stay close to investigations while guiding squad priorities and improvements.

You will partner with Data Science, ML/AI, and Product teams to improve labeling, features, and model health, while reporting on team health and emerging risks to leadership.