Moderntreasury Head of Risk at Modern Treasury responsible for building the risk function from the ground up. Own underwriting, transaction risk, reserves, detection, and risk engine systems to manage money movement risk.
Responsibilities
Onboarding & underwriting: How we evaluate customers before they move money with us — what we need to know to say yes, what conditions we attach, and how to reach that decision fast enough that it isn't the reason a customer picks someone else. You will partner with Compliance on KYB while owning the underwriting judgment beside it.
Transaction risk & limits: How we authorize money movement in real time, and how limits flex as we learn more about a business. This includes the hard cases — managing dynamic limits when a few customers drive most of the volume, and loosening constraints on good customers as fast as the data allows.
Reserves & exposure: Reserve policy and our view of loss exposure across ACH returns, unauthorized debits, and counterparty failure. You will quantify what we're exposed to, decide what's worth taking, and make that reasoning legible to the rest of the company.
Detection & the risk engine: The machinery. You will select and deploy the tooling — vendor, in-house, or both — that turns policy into automated decisions, and use modern AI tooling to automate case handling rather than staffing your way out of the problem.
New rails, stablecoins & wallet controls: The emerging surface area. You will help Modern Treasury expand into stablecoins, wallets, RfP, and local rails in other countries safely — understanding the risks unique to each rail, partnering with Product on controls that are both safe and usable, and designing for new money-movement patterns before they become edge cases at scale.
WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR
You've built this before: You've stood up a risk function at an early-stage or high-growth company rather than inherited a mature one. You know what the first version looks like, what to defer, and what will hurt in eighteen months if you skip it now.
Payments risk, specifically: Not lending or credit. You understand ACH returns, settlement timing, unauthorized debit exposure, and counterparty risk. You know the difference between risk and compliance, and where they have to work as one.
Curiosity about new rails: Stablecoin, wallet, RfP, or international local-rail experience is a strong plus. More importantly, you are interested in learning unfamiliar rails quickly and translating their unique risks into practical product and operational controls.
A systems thinker, not a queue operator: You think about decisioning at scale and design for an order of magnitude more volume. You'll set thresholds and review edge cases by hand when needed, but you're building toward something that doesn't require it.
Technical and data fluency: You can go deep with engineers and hold your own. You're comfortable in the data yourself — SQL, ideally Python — and fluent in applying modern AI tools to operational problems.
Scar tissue, earned well: You've seen things go wrong — a fraud ring, a loss event, a control that failed in a way nobody anticipated — and carry the pattern recognition that comes with it. You were in the room, not the cause.