Head of Fraud

Polymarket•New York, NY

19h•$500,000 - $600,000

About The Position

The Head of Fraud owns Polymarket’s fraud risk end to end, including strategy, prevention and detection controls, investigations, and resolution of findings. The role covers first-party fraud—such as chargeback and friendly fraud, promotion abuse, ACH fraud, and multi-accounting—and third-party fraud, including account takeover, identity and payment fraud, phishing, scams, and organized fraud rings. The position balances loss prevention, customer friction, commercial growth, and regulatory expectations. The Head of Fraud partners with Product and Engineering teams, which they do not manage, to influence roadmaps and deliver fraud controls. They also work with Compliance, Legal, Data, Payments, Customer Support, and Security. The role builds and leads a fraud team, manages fraud vendors and tooling, and reports fraud exposure, losses, control performance, and emerging threats to senior leadership and governance forums.

Requirements

10 or more years of fraud experience in fintech, payments, banking, crypto, trading, online gaming, or another high-volume digital platform.
At least five years of leadership experience, with direct accountability for fraud prevention, investigations, operations, and measurable outcomes.
Exceptional ability to influence Product and Engineering teams that the role does not manage, build trust, make data-backed cases, win prioritization, and turn disagreement into decisions.
Track record of building preventative and detective controls from scratch and demonstrating that they reduce losses without harming good customers.
Hands-on experience with both first-party and third-party fraud, including account takeover, identity fraud, and payment fraud.
Uses AI and automation for detection models, investigation tooling, case triage, and day-to-day work, and understands when models or rules are appropriate.
Commercial judgment to balance fraud losses, customer friction, and growth, and quantify trade-offs.
Knowledge of regulatory expectations for fraud programs, including governance, documentation, testing, and escalation, and ability to defend the program in an exam.
Ability to drive outcomes quickly, prioritize, and close work in a fast-moving, high-growth environment.
Comfort working directly in SQL and with data teams to size problems and measure control performance.

Nice To Haves

Experience at a regulated exchange, derivatives venue, broker, or crypto platform with on-chain and fiat flows.
Familiarity with blockchain analytics and wallet-level risk signals.
Exposure to market abuse, trade surveillance, and its intersection with fraud.
Experience building fraud capabilities across multiple jurisdictions.
Hands-on experience shipping LLM- or agent-based tooling for investigations.

Responsibilities

Own the fraud risk framework, risk appetite, and roadmap.
Maintain a living fraud risk assessment and typology library covering onboarding, funding, trading, and withdrawals.
Report fraud exposure, losses, control performance, and emerging threats to senior leadership and governance forums.
Assess fraud risk before new products, payment methods, promotions, and material feature changes launch, in partnership with Product and Engineering.
Define and implement preventative controls, including identity and device signals, step-up authentication, velocity and limit rules, and payment and withdrawal checks.
Build and continuously tune detective controls, including monitoring rules, ML and AI models, anomaly detection, alerting, and case management.
Tune controls to balance loss rates, false positives, and customer friction.
Own investigations from triage through root cause analysis and closure.
Ensure findings from monitoring, audits, regulatory exams, and incidents have an owner, fix, and deadline, and are closed out.
Feed investigation and control lessons back into product, controls, and policy to prevent recurrence.
Build and lead a high-performing team of analysts, investigators, and fraud data specialists.
Influence Product and Engineering roadmaps, secure prioritization for fraud work, and design fraud prevention into features from the start.
Work with Compliance and Legal on regulatory expectations, SAR-related escalations, and exam readiness.
Select and manage fraud vendors and tooling.