Senior Manager, Payments Risk

Overview

This role is part of Payments and Fintech within a founder-led, high-growth SaaS organization. The payments team processes billions of dollars annually and supports how thousands of clinics get paid and how patients experience paying for care.

The position is responsible for building and operating a scalable, balanced risk engine—owning the “operating system” across people, processes, and technology—while maintaining an excellent customer experience.

Responsibilities

• Merchant risk policy: Define onboarding criteria, verification standards, exception handling, escalation paths, and ongoing merchant monitoring.
• Risk appetite alignment: Partner with Legal, Finance, and the VP to set and operationalize the organization’s stated risk appetite.
• Risk reporting and loss management: Own portfolio losses and the risk reporting pack, including loss rate, approval rate, time-to-decision, dispute and win rate, and support Finance with budgeting and forecasting losses.
• Transaction monitoring strategy: Design transaction rules, risk flags, review processes, thresholds, time-to-decision, and false positive rate.
• Dispute strategy: Determine the strategy to improve win rates for customers and reduce disputes before they occur.
• Escalation, holds, and offboarding decisions: Make decisions with clear judgment on when executive or legal sign-off is required.
• Fraud and merchant quality assessment: Identify fraud patterns and detect when previously good merchants begin to pose risk.
• Compliance obligations: In partnership with Legal and the VP, make recommendations related to card network and Stripe compliance obligations, ensuring the organization is protected and customers understand their obligations.
• Systems and tooling strategy: Reimagine the risk stack and manual processes as an AI-forward, AI-native system with agentic workflows, while making practical recommendations about where humans should step in.

Requirements

• 6+ years in payments risk, ideally with leadership and/or highly cross-functional experience.
• Experience with embedded payments at a software platform that carries liability.
• Expertise in payments risk, including working knowledge of acquiring, underwriting, chargebacks, and transaction monitoring.
• Comfortable with Stripe, especially Connect, or a comparable platform, including a clear understanding of capabilities and limitations.
• Ability to write policies people follow and communicate difficult decisions to clinic owners with compassion.
• Strong data skills to build reporting independently; experience with SQL and Stripe Sigma, or similar tools, is a plus.
• Ability to operate effectively as the primary owner of this function for a period of time, with strong interest in building the function.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Stripe Sigma, or similar reporting/data tools.

Compensation & Benefits

• Annual salary range (USD): $156,000 to $253,500
• Most new hires join at $185,300 USD annually (the “accomplished” stage for this role).
• Salaries below may reflect strong potential while developing key skills; salaries above may apply to candidates with significant impact and deep organization-specific knowledge.

The organization provides regular career development conversations with compensation growth as skills and impact increase.

A comprehensive benefits package is offered.

Location

• Remote-first role.
• Team operates across Canada, the US, and the UK.
• Not hybrid.