Merchant Risk & Agentic Ops Lead

Pockyt; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) match

Unlimited PTO

Equity grant

Job summary

Pockyt in New York City is seeking a Head of Risk & Agentic Operations to lead the end-to-end risk function, from merchant acceptance to first transaction. You will define policy, build a high-velocity risk team, and partner with executive leadership to instrument decisions for an AI-driven payments platform.

You will collaborate with the CEO, CCO, and Applied AI engineering to create machine-readable risk rules and dashboards, ensuring scalable, compliant operations across borders.

Qualifications

• 8–15 years in merchant risk and operations in fintech/payments.
• Proven track record building risk policy and automated decisioning.
• Experience with sponsor banks or cross-border payments.
• Ability to translate business goals into machine-readable rules.

Responsibilities

• Own 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 dashboard the exec team trusts.
• Translate risk policy into machine-readable rubrics that drive underwriting, monitoring, and RFI workflows.
• Manage and develop the senior underwriter, hire two to three more risk/merchant-ops hires over 12 months.
• Partner with the CCO on AML-related onboarding elements and with the AI lead on encoding risk policy into rules for agents.

Skills

Merchant risk

Underwriting policy

Regulatory dialogue

Risk analytics

Machine-readable policy

Leadership

Stakeholder mgmt

Tools

SQL

Looker/BI

Tableau

Risk management software

Job description

Pockyt in New York City is seeking a Head of Risk & Agentic Operations to lead the end-to-end risk function, from merchant acceptance to first transaction. You will define policy, build a high-velocity risk team, and partner with executive leadership to instrument decisions for an AI-driven payments platform.

You will collaborate with the CEO, CCO, and Applied AI engineering to create machine-readable risk rules and dashboards, ensuring scalable, compliant operations across borders.