Head of Risk

Modern Treasury • San Francisco, CA

1d • $200,000 - $285,000

About The Position

Modern Treasury is hiring a Head of Risk to build our risk function from the ground up. Money moves through Modern Treasury for some of the largest and fastest-growing companies in the economy. How well we manage the risk in that movement directly shapes the product — who we can onboard, how fast they can transact, and how much friction they feel along the way. This is a foundational, hands-on role. You will decide how customers are underwritten, how limits and reserves are set, how transactions are authorized, and how we detect fraud — and you will build those systems early, before scale forces the decisions for you. This role reports to our General Counsel, who leads Legal, Compliance, and Risk.

Requirements

• 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.
• Judgment you can defend: You'll make consequential calls with incomplete information and get some wrong. You reason clearly about tradeoffs, write your thinking down, and can explain why a decision was right even when the outcome wasn't.
• Influence across the company: You'll often be telling people something they don't want to hear. You can make the case for risk investment in terms the rest of the business cares about.

Nice To Haves

• Management experience is a plus: You may hire onto this team within the first year. You don't need to have run a large org, but you should have managed before and want to build a team over time.

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.
• Work across Engineering, Product, Compliance, Finance, and our customer-facing teams, and make sure risk and compliance run on one coherent set of systems rather than two stacks that disagree.

What This Job Offers

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