Senior Product Manager, Fraud & Risk

Tala; Santa Monica (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Tala is seeking a Senior Product Manager, Fraud & Authentication, to lead the strategy and execution of secure, scalable fraud prevention and identity systems. You will own the product roadmap across signup, login, and customer actions, balancing risk with a smooth user experience.

You’ll work with engineering, data science, and analytics to define metrics, monitor performance, and drive impactful outcomes that protect customers and the platform’s growth.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of Product Management experience, including complex technical products or platforms.
• Proven experience in fraud, risk, authentication, identity, KYC, or related areas.
• Experience partnering with Engineering and Data Science to build detection and decisioning systems.
• Experience using metrics to drive product decisions and measure outcomes.
• Experience managing fraud incidents or high-impact risk events.
• Strong ability to translate ambiguous problems into clear product requirements and roadmaps.

Responsibilities

• Define Tala's multi-year product strategy and roadmap for fraud prevention, authentication, and identity.
• Identify opportunities to improve fraud prevention across signup, login, and high-risk actions.
• Balance security with user experience by reducing losses and false positives while minimizing friction.
• Translate fraud patterns and business needs into clear strategies and priorities.
• Partner with Data Science and Analytics to define model objectives and evaluate performance.
• Establish and monitor metrics like fraud loss, detection accuracy, and authentication success.
• Lead a cross-functional team of engineers to deliver the roadmap and iterate after launch.
• Investigate incidents, evolve patterns, and translate learnings into product improvements.
• Collaborate across Product, Engineering, Data Science, Lending, Finance, Marketing, Legal.

Skills

Product management

Fraud & risk

Data-driven decisions

Cross-functional leadership

Vendor management

Communication

Job description

About Tala

Tala is the AI-native credit infrastructure that connects global capital to the global majority. We combine proprietary risk intelligence with an expanding network of capital and distribution partners to power credit access at scale. To date, Tala has distributed more than $9 billion in capital to more than 14 million customers across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, building the definitive contextual dataset on thin-file borrowers in emerging markets. Tala is now converting that foundation into shared infrastructure that partners, capital providers, and ecosystems can build on.

Given the global nature of our team, we operate on a remote-first approach with office hubs in Santa Monica, CA (HQ); Nairobi, Kenya; Mexico City, Mexico; Manila, the Philippines; and Bangalore, India.

Most Talazens join us because they connect with our mission. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Tala, we’d love to hear from you!

The Role

Tala is on a mission to unleash the economic power of the global majority. We’re building financial services that give people greater access, control, and agency over their financial lives.

As Tala continues to scale, protecting our customers while creating a seamless experience is more important than ever. We’re looking for aSenior Product Manager, Fraud & Authentication to lead the strategy and execution of the systems that keep our customers and platform safe.

As the Senior Product Manager, Fraud & Authentication, you’ll own Tala’s product strategy for fraud prevention, customer authentication, and identity-related experiences across the customer journey.

You’ll tackle complex problems at the intersection of fraud, risk, machine learning, data, engineering, and customer experience.

Your goal will be to help Tala identify and prevent fraudulent activity while minimizing unnecessary friction for legitimate customers.

You’ll work closely with Engineering, Data Science, Analytics, Lending, Finance, Customer Care, Marketing, Legal, and other global teams to turn complex fraud patterns and ambiguous problems into scalable products and systems.

This is a highly cross-functional role for someone who enjoys solving difficult problems with data, moving quickly, and building products that have a measurable impact on both customers and the business.

What You’ll Do

Own Fraud & Authentication Product Strategy

• Define and own Tala’s multi-year product strategy and roadmap for fraud prevention, customer authentication, identity, and related risk capabilities.
• Identify opportunities to improve fraud prevention across signup, login, account management, and other high-risk customer actions.
• Balance fraud prevention with customer experience by reducing fraud losses and false positives while minimizing unnecessary friction.
• Translate complex fraud patterns, emerging attack vectors, and business needs into clear product strategies and priorities.

Build Data-Driven Fraud Products

• Partner closely with Data Science and Analytics to define model objectives, evaluate model and feature performance, and identify opportunities to improve detection.
• Help determine appropriate fraud decision thresholds and rules based on data and business objectives.
• Establish and monitor key metrics such as fraud loss rates, detection accuracy, false-positive rates, customer conversion, and authentication success.
• Identify data gaps and work with technical teams to improve the data and infrastructure needed to make effective fraud decisions.
• Collaborate on fraud detection models, rules, feature infrastructure, and decisioning systems.

Lead Product Execution

• Translate ambiguous fraud and authentication problems into clear product requirements that Engineering teams can execute against.
• Lead a cross-functional team of engineers and partners to deliver the roadmap.
• Prioritize initiatives based on customer impact, fraud exposure, business value, technical complexity, and data.
• Partner with Engineering to understand Tala’s fraud and authentication infrastructure and identify opportunities to improve scalability and reliability.
• Drive initiatives from strategy and discovery through launch, measurement, and iteration.

Manage Fraud & Risk Events

• Partner with Data Science, Analytics, Engineering, and Operations to investigate fraud incidents and emerging fraud patterns.
• Turn lessons from fraud events into proactive product and system improvements.
• Develop approaches that allow Tala to respond quickly as fraud patterns and attack vectors evolve.

Collaborate Across Tala

• Build strong partnerships across Product, Engineering, Data Science, Analytics, Lending, Finance, Customer Care, Marketing, and Legal.
• Communicate complex fraud and risk concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Manage relationships with external vendors and technology partners supporting fraud, authentication, identity, or risk capabilities.
• Create alignment across distributed global teams and drive decisions in an environment where information may be incomplete or ambiguous.

What You’ll Need

• 5+ years of Product Management experience, with experience owning complex technical products or platforms.
• Proven experience building or managing products related to fraud, risk, authentication, identity, KYC, account security, payments, lending, or financial crime.
• Experience partnering closely with Engineering and Data Science to build fraud detection, risk decisioning, authentication, or identity solutions.
• Experience using data and metrics to make product decisions and measure outcomes.
• Experience managing fraud incidents, emerging fraud patterns, or other high-impact risk events.
• Ability to translate complex and ambiguous problems into clear product requirements and actionable roadmaps.
• Experience managing external vendors or technology partners.
• Strong cross-functional leadership and communication skills.
• Comfort operating in a fast-paced, distributed, and highly collaborative environment.

Our vision is to build a new financial ecosystem where everyone can participate on equal footing and access the tools they need to be financially healthy. We strongly believe that inclusion fosters innovation and we’re proud to have a diverse global team that represents a multitude of backgrounds, cultures, and experience. We hire talented people regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.