Director of Payments & Fraud Operations

Courtyard Inc.

1d • Remote

About The Position

Courtyard has grown to over $1.5B in annualized volume by treating operations as a core product, not a back office. A large share of that volume moves through cards, on-ramps, and third-party payments, fraud, and KYC providers. In this business, payments and fraud are not two problems. They’re one problem, and every dial you turn to stop fraud costs you a real customer at checkout.
We’re hiring a Director of Payments & Fraud Operations to own that tradeoff end to end. This is the person who decides where the line sits between friction and loss, who manages the partners that enforce it, and who sets the strategy for how Courtyard scales payments trust to the next 100x and helps us grow another 100x.

Requirements

• 10+ years in payments, fraud, risk, or trust & safety operations, with real ownership of fraud and chargeback outcomes at a high-growth consumer platform, marketplace, fintech, or payments company. You’ve lived through fraud attacks and know what actually works under pressure.
• Deep fluency in the mechanics: chargeback reason codes and where liability really shifts, 3DS and its limits, KYC/identity verification tradeoffs, authorization and decline optimization, and the fraud-vs-conversion economics that tie them together.
• A vendor operator. You’ve managed processors, fraud providers, and KYC partners; you’ve pushed them to change their roadmaps; and you can read a pricing agreement well enough to spot the difference between what a contract says and what your account rep promised.
• Strong commercial and analytical instincts. You reason in unit economics — cost per chargeback, cost of a false decline, lifetime value of a customer you nearly blocked — and you make the call with incomplete data because the drop is happening now.
• High agency and calm under fire. When something breaks or a spike hits, you don’t file a ticket and wait for the vendor — you get on the call, run the options, make the decision, and document the playbook so it’s handled faster next time.
• A collaborator, not a silo. You’ll set policy that support executes, that engineering builds tooling for, and that finance and leadership sign off on. You make those partners faster and more confident, not more confused.

Responsibilities

• Own policies and operations that prevent abuse while protecting legitimate users.
• Define verification, blocking, and unblocking rules, lead incident response, and oversee account takeover prevention.
• Own fraud strategy across the customer funnel, balancing fraud loss, approval rates, chargebacks, and customer friction.
• Set risk thresholds and track performance through key metrics and dashboards.
• Improve checkout conversion by optimizing authorization rates, declines, challenges, abandonment, and payment methods.
• Partner with engineering to drive strategy and investigate performance changes.
• Manage payment, fraud, and KYC vendors, ensuring strong performance, accountability, and clear ownership of commercial terms, risk, and contracts.
• Shape the long-term payments and fraud roadmap, including vendor strategy, payment expansion, risk management, and scaling the platform for growth.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance packages with dependent coverage
• Competitive salary with ample opportunities for career advancement and development
• 401(k) plan with a 4% employer match to help you plan for the future
• $100 monthly dogfooding stipend to support trying out our products firsthand
• Access to employee wellness programs designed to support your overall well-being

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed