Truss
Founding Head of Risk
San Francisco, California, US / Austin, Texas, USRemotePosted 20 days ago$175,000 – $250,000
Full TimeExecutiveRemoteUS
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Job Description
About the Role Truss is a regulated fintech: real bank accounts, real money movement, cards, payables, receivables. Risk is not a side quest. Every dollar we move is a decision — onboard or don't, pay
Key Highlights
- Own fraud and abuse end-to-end. Account takeover, synthetic identity, payment fraud, check fraud, mule activity, promo/referral abuse, friendly fraud, first-party abuse. Instrument the signals, write the rules, close the loops when attackers adapt.
- Stand up detection → review → action. Queues, SLAs, tooling for ops/CS, clear dispositions, feedback into the engine. Manual review that doesn't become a black hole; automation that doesn't become a false-positive factory.
- Partner with engineering and product. You're not throwing PDFs over the wall. You sit with the people who ship ledger, payments, onboarding, and cards.
- Tune for a real business, not a demo. False positives kill good contractors. False negatives kill the company. You hold both. You know how to trade loss rate, approval rate, and ops cost with eyes open.
- Cover the regulated surface. BSA/AML and OFAC-aware controls, KYC/KYB quality, transaction monitoring posture, SAR-relevant patterns, bank-partner and sponsor expectations — coordinated with compliance, not outsourced to them.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
- You've built production risk / fraud systems at a high-growth fintech or payments company — non-negotiable. Rules engines, decisioning platforms, feature stores, graph or link analysis, velocity and device signals, model + rules hybrids. Venmo / Cash App / Stripe / Block / Marqeta / similar caliber experience is the reference class.
- You've done it when the company was still early or scaling hard — messy data, incomplete identity, attackers iterating weekly.
- Deep fluency in how money moves and how it gets stolen: ACH, wires, checks, cards, account funding, payouts, ledger edge cases.
- Strong quantitative and systems instincts. You can reason about precision/recall, dollar-weighted loss, segment-level risk, and rule interactions.
- Ownership mentality. You take the weight off the founder's plate. You make the call, ship the control, and watch the metric.
- Comfortable as the whole function today. No team to hide behind. First you build, then you may hire.
- Fluent with modern tooling (SQL, rules/events stacks, AI as a lever). We're a small, technical company.
- Must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. (or eligible for TN).
Preferred Qualifications
- Direct experience with sponsor banks, program managers, or card issuers and the controls they demand.
- You've owned or deeply partnered on AML transaction monitoring, sanctions, or KYC/KYB quality.
- You've built or rebuilt a rules engine / decisioning service (Sift, Alloy, Unit21, Homegrown, etc.) and have scars from both.
- Incident leadership: a real fraud event, a bank partner fire drill, or a loss spike you diagnosed and fixed.
- Enough code to be dangerous (Python/SQL/TypeScript) — you prototype ideas quickly.
Skills & Technologies
SQLPythonTypeScript
About the Company
Truss
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Job Details
Employment Type
Full Time
Experience Level
Executive
Salary Range
$175,000 – $250,000
Location
San Francisco, California, US / Austin, Texas, US
Work Mode
Remote
Posted
20 days ago
Country
US