Payment Fraud Analyst Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Position Overview

We are seeking an exceptionally technical, analytical, and execution-oriented Lead Fraud Analyst to serve as our primary architect for post-onboarding transaction risk, ongoing account monitoring, and real-time behavioral rules. Reporting directly to the Chief Operating Officer (COO), you will be the core strategist behind protecting our card portfolio from losses, focusing on the post-onboarding account lifecycle. You will write complex database queries, design automated transaction velocity limits, and build scalable, post-authorization fraud defenses.

This is an active role that combines strategic, high-level rules engineering with tactical daily execution. In addition to designing systemic rule architectures, you will actively monitor and work the live transaction review queue. This ensures you maintain direct, firsthand exposure to live cardholder fraud vectors, helping you immediately translate queue insights into proactive rules adjustments. While your main day-to-day focus is heavily indexed on post-onboarding transaction controls and ongoing account monitoring, a strong foundational knowledge of onboarding identity verification (IDV) and synthetic identity fraud is considered a major plus to ensure complete lifecycle risk alignment.

Location: Full-time, fully remote. Candidates must be physically located in the Eastern or Central Time Zones.

Key Responsibilities

Post-Onboarding Rules Architecture & Ongoing Account Monitoring

• Rule Development & Integration: Design, test, and deploy real-time post-onboarding transaction rules to block active fraud patterns and authorization exploits.
• Velocity & Behavioral Limits: Build, simulate, and configure dynamic transaction velocity limits, behavioral profiling rules, and risk thresholds to catch card-not-present (CNP) fraud, credit line bust-outs, and digital wallet (Apple Pay/Google Pay) provisioning abuse.
• Ongoing Account Monitoring: Design, configure, and maintain real-time monitoring rules for non-transactional account activities (such as profile edits, changes to PII, email/phone updates, password resets, and linking/unlinking funding sources) to detect and prevent Account Takeover (ATO) or first-party abuse before unauthorized transactions occur.
• Behavioral Account Profiling: Establish customer-level usage baselines and ongoing behavior models to identify anomalies in login frequencies, geo-location hops (impossible travel), and device-fingerprint shifts to ensure account health and detect compromised sessions.
• Friction & Approval Optimization: Continually analyze and adjust rules based on risk-to-friction cost models, optimizing approval ratios to keep net fraud losses below targets while minimizing false-positive declines for legitimate customers.
  

Hands-On Queue Management & Rapid Incident Response

• Transaction Alert Triage: Actively monitor and work the live, high-risk transactional alert queue, executing swift, defensible block or release actions.
• Real-Time Incident Mitigation: Translate frontline alert queue insights into immediate rules adjustments, creating localized merchant blocks or temporary velocity limits to mitigate active fraud attacks in real time.
• SLA Compliance: Strictly manage operational processing windows for held alerts, maintaining a high throughput rate to minimize manual queue build-ups and meet cardholder expectations.
  

ACH Payment Fraud & Hold Strategies

• ACH Risk Architecture: Design and deploy automated monitoring rules specifically for ACH transactions, focusing on detecting return codes (e.g., R01, R03, R05), unauthorized debit patterns, and high-velocity funding anomalies.
• Dynamic ACH Holds: Configure risk-based ACH hold strategies that leverage account tenure, verified balance history, and velocity metrics to effectively mitigate return risk without negatively impacting the customer experience.
• Exception Management: Monitor ACH exception queues and manage return-to-originator processes to minimize financial exposure while maintaining strict regulatory compliance.
  

Advanced SQL Data Mining & Loss Diagnostics

• Forensic Database Querying: Write daily, complex SQL queries on raw transactional tables to conduct post-mortem audits of cardholder fraud events and identify rules vulnerabilities.
• Risk Reporting & BI: Build and maintain interactive dashboards to track rule efficiency, transaction risk metrics, and gross and net loss curves for executive-level reporting.
• Loss Attribution Modeling: Partner with Credit Risk to perform detailed root-cause reviews on write-offs, distinguishing transactional fraud occurrences from credit risk defaults.
  

Customer Journey Alignment & Lifecycle Collaboration (Preferred)

• Onboarding Risk Literacy: Maintain familiarity with digital onboarding identity verification (IDV) platforms (Alloy, Socure, SentiLink) to seamlessly link application-stage risk signals with post-onboarding transaction rules.
• Product & Payment Security: Partner directly with Product and Engineering to design and configure transactional limits, secure provisioning holds, and authorization parameters for new card feature releases.
  

Qualifications & Technical Skills

• Professional Experience: 3–5+ years of hands-on experience in transactional payment fraud prevention, transaction monitoring rules development, or database analytics within a fintech neobank, credit card issuer, or processor.
• Mandatory SQL Expertise: Elite, active SQL capabilities for querying transaction databases and structural data extraction. Python or R proficiency is a strong advantage.
• Rules Engine Experience: Practical, hands-on experience configuring and tuning transactional rules and ongoing account monitoring alerts.
• Domain Mastery: Deep, granular understanding of payment card risk, merchant category codes (MCCs), authorization messages, digital wallet risk, account takeover (ATO) vectors, and card-not-present (CNP) fraud.
• Identity & Onboarding Awareness: Strong conceptual awareness of digital onboarding risk platforms (Alloy, Socure, SentiLink) is preferred but not required.
• Agile Execution: High enthusiasm for a startup environment, comfortable balancing executive-ready data-modeling with rolling up your sleeves to manage manual transactional review queues.
• Quantitative Background: B.S. in Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, Finance, Management Information Systems, or a highly quantitative field.
  

Benefits & Working Environment

We are built as a remote-first company, offering an agile and high-ownership work culture. We value technical capability, data-backed execution, and a willingness to roll up your sleeves to protect our portfolio.

• Competitive compensation
• Comprehensive Health, Dental, & Vision Care
• Equity participation
• 401(k) plan
• 18 days PTO, 5 sick days, and 11 company holidays
• High visibility role with input into executive strategy