Staff+ Software Engineer, Financial Fraud

United States Digital Space LLC; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 485,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC in San Francisco is seeking a software engineer for the Fraud Prevention team. You will design and build real-time risk decisions at authorization, manage the dispute and chargeback lifecycle, and detect monetization abuse across subscriptions, trials, and in-app purchases.

The role requires deep Python and SQL expertise, production experience in fraud/risk systems, and the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Proficiency in Python, SQL, and data analysis tools.
• Experience building or operating fraud, risk, or abuse detection systems in production.
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design and build real-time risk decisioning that scores transactions at authorization time, balancing fraud loss, approval rates, and latency constraints.
• Build tooling and automation for the dispute and chargeback lifecycle, from review queues to evidence collection and loss reporting.
• Engineer fraud signals at scale — device fingerprinting, BIN and issuer signals, velocity features, and cross-account linkage — and detect monetization abuse across subscriptions, trials, promotions, and in-app purchases.
• Own a portfolio of metrics — loss rate, dispute rate, authorization approval impact, and false-positive rate — rather than optimizing any single number.
• Lead investigations into emerging fraud patterns, building multi-layered defenses designed for attacker adaptation rather than point-in-time rules.
• Work cross-functionally with finance, support, legal, and data science, and with external payment processors and platform partners.

Skills

Python

SQL

Data analysis tools

Job description

About the company

the company’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

The Fraud Prevention team protects the company's payment and monetization surfaces from financial abuse — keeping fraud losses, dispute rates, and network monitoring exposure in check while preserving a smooth experience for legitimate customers. As a software engineer on this team, you will build the systems that make risk decisions in real time, manage the dispute and chargeback lifecycle, and detect monetization abuse across subscriptions, in-app purchases, and promotions. The ideal candidate can see things from attackers' perspectives, anticipate their responses to countermeasures, and never loses sight of the fact that a false positive here is a paying customer.

Payments fraud is more externally coupled than most trust and safety work — you'll collaborate closely with finance, support, and legal teams internally, and with payment processors and platform partners externally.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build real-time risk decisioning that scores transactions at authorization time, balancing fraud loss, approval rates, and latency constraints
• Build tooling and automation for the dispute and chargeback lifecycle, from review queues to evidence collection and loss reporting
• Engineer fraud signals at scale — device fingerprinting, BIN and issuer signals, velocity features, and cross-account linkage — and detect monetization abuse across subscriptions, trials, promotions, and in-app purchases
• Own a portfolio of metrics — loss rate, dispute rate, authorization approval impact, and false-positive rate — rather than optimizing any single number
• Lead investigations into emerging fraud patterns, building multi-layered defenses designed for attacker adaptation rather than point-in-time rules
• Work cross-functionally with finance, support, legal, and data science, and with external payment processors and platform partners

Minimum Qualifications:

• Proficiency in Python, SQL, and data analysis tools
• Experience building or operating fraud, risk, or abuse detection systems in production
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders

Preferred Qualifications:

• 8+ years of industry software engineering experience, with a focus on payments fraud or risk
• Fluency with payments rails: card networks, payment service providers (e.g., Stripe, Adyen), in-app purchase platforms (Apple, Google), refund flows, and the chargeback and dispute lifecycle
• Direct experience combating fraud typologies such as card testing, stolen-card monetization, refund and chargeback abuse, subscription and trial abuse, promotional abuse, and friendly fraud
• Understanding of fraud loss accounting — fraud loss vs. dispute fees vs. card network monitoring programs (e.g., VDMP, i VFMP, Mastercard ECP) — and why chargeback rate thresholds carry existential stakes
• Experience building hybrid rules-and-ML risk systems: real-time scoring at authorization plus post-authorization review workflows
• Experience at a marketplace or subscription business, or on a processor-side or issuer-side risk team

Compensation

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

Annual Salary: $320,000 — $485,000 USD

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas, but we are not able to cover all roles and candidates. We will make reasonable attempts to secure a visa if an offer is made.