Head of Risk, Agentic Operations

Pockyt; New York (NY); On-site; USD 220,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Employer-paid health insurance

401(k) match

Unlimited PTO

Equity eligibility

Job summary

Pockyt is seeking a Head of Risk & Agentic Operations in NYC to own the full risk lifecycle from merchant approval to transaction. You will define risk appetite, build a scalable policy framework, and lead a growing risk team, partnering with executives and the Applied AI lead on automation and dashboards.

This role requires deep experience in merchant risk, a track record of policy hardening, and the ability to ship machine-readable decisioning at scale in a fast-moving, AI-native payments

Qualifications

• 8–15 years in merchant risk and merchant operations at a payments processor or fintech.
• Experience owning risk decisioning and post-decision throughput.
• Ability to design machine-readable risk policies and dashboards.

Responsibilities

• Own merchant risk strategy end-to-end from acceptance to monitoring.
• Own the operations arc from approval to first transaction with SLAs.
• Define high-risk gating criteria and escalation paths.
• Translate risk policy into machine-readable rubrics for agents.
• Manage the senior underwriter and hire more risk staff as volume grows.
• Partner with CCO on AML onboarding elements and with AI lead on risk policy.
• Build the Risk & Agentic Operations dashboard.
• Turn executive asks into shipped policy and instrumentation.

Skills

Merchant risk

Risk operations

Policy design

Dashboard instrumentation

Team leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

Pockyt is building the AI-native infrastructure for global money movement. We give merchants a single platform to accept payments from anywhere, send money globally, and manage funds through Global Virtual Accounts and stablecoins — but our ambition runs deeper than the rails themselves. We're architecting the connective tissue that lets money move across borders the way information moves across the internet: instantly, intelligently, and autonomously.

We serve a wide spectrum of merchants, from sophisticated enterprise platforms running complex multi-currency operations to the next generation of AI-powered startups, including the one-person unicorns we believe are about to reshape the global economy. Today, that means one integration, one account view, and one place to track everything. Tomorrow, it means a financial layer that AI agents can natively transact on — where money flows are orchestrated, optimized, and reconciled without human bottlenecks.

Our mission is to make global commerce frictionless. We're not building another payments platform. We're building the operating system for how value moves in an agentic, borderless economy.

The Role

We're hiring a Head of Risk & Agentic Operations to own the arc from "merchant approved" to "merchant transacting" — and to make every step of it intelligent, instrumented, and increasingly agent-run. This is our first risk leadership hire in NYC and a peer role to our Applied AI engineering lead. Together, the two of you set the operating model for the next phase of Pockyt: a self-improving company where policy is machine-readable, decisions feed back into the system, and every human review trains the next automated one.

This role brings the full arc together under one neck — merchant acceptance, underwriting policy, ongoing merchant monitoring, sponsor-bank risk dialogue, and the operational throughput from approval to first transaction. You'll inherit a senior underwriter on day one, hire two to three more risk and merchant-ops team members over the next twelve months, and own the policy and the throughput end-to-end.

You won't be doing this alone. You'll work directly with our CEO, partner closely with our CCO on the AML-adjacent surfaces of onboarding, and pair tightly with our Applied AI engineering lead on encoding risk policy into rules and rubrics that agents can execute against. Your first priorities will be defining and enforcing the risk appetite at the front of the funnel, designing the SLA system that compresses time from approval to transaction, and standing up the Risk & Agentic Operations dashboard that becomes the executive team's source of truth.

If you've spent your career in merchant risk and have been waiting for the seat where you get to write the policy, build the team, design the dashboard, and be the human counterpart to the agents executing it — this is it.

What You'll Do

• Own merchant risk strategy end-to-end: acceptance criteria, underwriting framework, risk appetite by segment, ongoing merchant monitoring policy, sponsor-bank risk dialogue
• Own the merchant operations arc from approval to first transaction: configure, enable, integrate, activate — with segment-level SLAs and a clean dashboard the executive team trusts
• Define and enforce the high-risk pipeline gating: published acceptance criteria, what gets declined at the door, and what gets pushed back to Sales BD with reasons attached
• Translate risk policy into machine-readable rubrics that drive the agents running underwriting, monitoring, and RFI workflows — a defining half of this role and the work that makes this seat distinct from any other risk leadership job in fintech
• Manage and develop the senior underwriter who joins you on day one; hire and ramp two to three more risk and merchant-ops team members as volume scales
• Partner with the CCO on the AML-driven elements inside onboarding (CDD/EDD, sanctions, beneficial ownership) — clean ownership, no co-owned ambiguity
• Partner with our Applied AI engineering lead on agentic underwriting, RFI triage, monitoring alerts, and the eval frameworks that keep agent-assisted decisions safe
• Own sponsor-bank and partner risk reviews — the quarterly pack, the live dialogue, and the remediation plans that come out of it
• Build and own the Risk & Agentic Operations metrics dashboard, populated with baselines, targets, owners, and live trends
• Translate ambiguous executive asks ("we're getting too many high-risk merchants through the door") into shipped policy, instrumentation, and process

What We're Looking For

• 8–15 years in merchant risk and merchant operations at a payments processor, acquirer, fintech, or sponsor bank — Stripe, Adyen, Marqeta, Brex, Mercury, Cross River, Column, or peer
• Direct experience owning both sides: risk decisioning (UW, acceptance, monitoring) and post-decision throughput (configure-to-transact, time-to-live, SLA design)
• Track record of compressing onboarding/UW turnaround while holding or improving loss numbers — you've personally moved the curve on a real merchant book
• A track record of killing bad merchant categories, defending acceptance criteria against commercial pressure, and rebuilding policy from the ground up when it stops fitting the business
• You think about risk policy the way an engineer thinks about an API — clear inputs, defined outputs, edge cases enumerated, observable behavior. You've worked with engineers on automated decisioning before, or you're impatient to start
• Comfort and credibility in the room with regulators, sponsor banks, and the board — clear written policy, sharp verbal communication, calm under examination
• A builder's instinct for instrumentation — you reach for the dashboard before the meeting, not after

Bonus Points

• Direct relationships with US sponsor banks or BIN sponsors; recent experience presenting a risk program to one
• Experience in cross-border payments, digital wallets, virtual accounts, or stablecoin merchant risk
• Built a risk or underwriting team from a single IC to a multi-person function
• Experience with high-risk verticals (gaming, crypto, marketplaces) or with fast-moving AI-native merchants whose risk profiles don't fit traditional UW templates
• Hands-on experience writing machine-readable risk policy, contributing to automated decisioning systems, or owning eval rubrics for LLM-assisted reviews
• Background as an examiner, regulator, or in a bank risk function — the perspective from the other side of the table

Why Pockyt

• Build at the frontier of AI + payments at a company shipping for both enterprise platforms and the next generation of AI-native merchants
• Real ownership and direct work with the CEO from day one — and a peer-level partnership with our Applied AI engineering lead on what may be the most interesting risk-meets-AI build in fintech right now
• A clear path to expanded scope as the business scales — Risk and Compliance leadership, operating committee membership, board-facing exposure
• The chance to be the first risk leader in NYC and shape the function from the foundation
• Competitive compensation, employer-paid health insurance, 401(k) match, and unlimited PTO
• Quarterly bonus pay-outs of up to 20% your base salary
• Eligibility for senior leadership equity grant, vesting over 4 years with a 1-year cliff (subject to Board approval)

How You'll Work

• Collaboration: Daily collaboration with the CCO, our Applied AI engineering lead, Finance Ops, and Sales BD; quarterly sponsor-bank and partner risk reviews; direct line to the CEO
• Quality bar: Every policy written in a form that's both human-readable and machine-executable; every decision instrumented; every change rolled out with measurable before/after
• Team building: Set the hiring bar, run interviews, develop the underwriter who joins you on day one, and build a team that scales with merchant volume

Success looks like:

the high-risk pipeline operating within policy with a clear, published gating system; meaningful compression of underwriting and configure-to-transact turnaround across segments; a published, machine-readable risk policy library the Applied AI team is actively building agents against; a Risk & Agentic Ops dashboard the executive team uses as the source of truth; and a team of two to three additional risk and merchant-ops hires ramped to plan within twelve months.