Senior Fraud and Risk Analyst

XFactor Talent; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

XFactor Talent is recruiting a Senior Fraud and Risk Analyst to join the Risk Policy team for a leading US fintech platform. You will design and optimize risk policies that balance fraud prevention with merchant experience, aiming to keep legitimate payments flowing in seconds while stopping bad actors.

You will collaborate with Product, Engineering and Data Science to deploy ML-driven policy decisions, assess emerging threats, and quantify the impact on merchants and platform growth.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in fraud analytics, risk strategy or payment risk management within fintech, banking or payments.
• Experience using AI/ML tools and automation to speed up fraud detection and risk decisioning.
• Record of designing and implementing risk policies that balance fraud prevention with customer experience and growth.
• Working knowledge of payment ecosystems: ACH, card networks, chargebacks and verification flows.
• Customer-first mindset and ability to balance risk with merchant experience.
• Strong communication skills for presenting trade-offs to stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design and optimise risk policies for the payments product and other fintech products to block bad actors without declining legitimate merchants.
• Balance fraud loss prevention with customer experience, collaborating with Product, Engineering and Customer Experience teams.
• Lead fraud and compliance risk assessments for emerging threats, launches, and changing needs.
• Investigate merchant escalations, chargeback patterns, and return anomalies to inform policy.
• Quantify customer impact of policy changes: fraud prevented, transactions preserved, volume enabled, churn risk reduced.
• Work with Data Science to integrate ML outputs into risk policy while avoiding over-penalising growing merchants.

Skills

Fraud analytics

Risk strategy

Payment risk management

Customer-centric mindset

Communication

Tools

AI/ML tools

Automation

Policy design tooling

Job description

A global data and analytics consultancy is hiring a Senior Fraud and Risk Analyst to work with the Risk Policy team of a leading US fintech platform, whose payments product is used by millions of small and mid-size businesses.

The role sits where fraud prevention meets customer retention. You design the risk policies that decide whether a legitimate merchant\'s payment goes through in seconds or is held for days, and you are measured on both fraud stopped and good customers kept.

What you will do

• Design and optimise risk policies for the payments product and other new fintech products, so controls block bad actors without declining legitimate merchants.
• Balance fraud loss prevention with customer experience, working with Product, Engineering and Customer Experience teams so risk decisions support platform growth and merchant retention.
• Lead fraud and compliance risk assessments for emerging threats, new product launches and changing customer needs, with attention to how holds, declines and reviews affect customers.
• Investigate merchant escalations, chargeback patterns and return anomalies, and turn the findings into policy improvements.
• Quantify the customer impact of every policy change: fraud prevented, legitimate transactions preserved, processing volume enabled and churn risk reduced.
• Work with Data Science to bring machine learning model outputs into risk policy, calibrated so new and growing merchants are not over-penalised.

What you bring

• 4+ years in fraud analytics, risk strategy or payment risk management within fintech, banking or payments.
• Experience using AI/ML tools and automation to speed up fraud detection and risk decisioning, spot emerging fraud patterns and build scalable, data-driven solutions.
• A record of designing and implementing risk policies that balance fraud prevention with customer experience and business growth.
• Working knowledge of payment ecosystems: ACH, card networks, chargeback processes and bank verification flows.
• A customer-first mindset: you consider how a risk control feels from the merchant\'s side and favour solutions that protect without punishing.
• Strong communication skills, able to present complex risk trade-offs to technical and business stakeholders.