Operational & Technology Risk Lead

DriveWealth•Chicago, IL

7d•$200,000 - $215,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Reporting to the Head of Risk Management, the Lead of Operational & Technology Risk owns the enterprise operational and resiliency risk program across a regulated, globally distributed brokerage platform. This is a builder's role. You will design the operational risk framework, including the enterprise risk taxonomy and appetite structure, stand up risk assessment and control assurance programs, own issue and risk event management, and build AI-native tooling that makes risk management faster, sharper, and practical for the people who actually own it. Success requires someone who thrives with autonomy, builds risk practices that hold up under scale and regulatory scrutiny while still letting the business move quickly, and can translate operational risk into decisions the business, executives, and the Board will act on. You will partner closely with Engineering, Product, Operations, Treasury, Security, Legal, and Compliance, which separately owns programs that integrate with the firm-wide operational risk framework.

Requirements

10+ years in operational, technology, or enterprise risk management, with significant time in a regulated financial services environment and prior ownership of a risk program.
Demonstrated experience building a risk function from an early stage, not only operating an established one.
Deep working knowledge of RCSA, control testing, issue management, KRI design, and risk event management.
Practical fluency with agentic AI applied to risk work, with real examples of what you have built or deployed. Hands-on coding is not required, but technical depth is.
Strong, practical understanding of broker-dealer operations and regulatory expectations across SEC, FINRA, CFTC, and NFA.
Experience setting enterprise risk methodology that specialist programs, such as AML, cyber, privacy, or vendor risk, execute against.
Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives and influence engineering and product organizations without formal authority.
Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to write for a Board audience and hold a room with senior leadership.

Nice To Haves

Experience at a broker-dealer, clearing firm, fintech, or embedded-finance / brokerage-as-a-service platform
Exposure to digital assets, tokenization, event contracts, or emerging market structure
Experience in a B2B or platform business where clients depend directly on your operational resiliency
Multi-jurisdiction or cross-border regulatory experience
Hands-on experience with GRC/IRM platforms, BI and visualization tooling, or agentic AI frameworks.
Relevant certifications: FRM, CRMA, CISA, CRISC, or comparable
Advanced degree in a business, technical, or quantitative field

Responsibilities

Build and Own the Operational Risk Framework: Build the enterprise operational risk taxonomy, risk appetite statements, and supporting policy architecture. Establish and lead the operational risk and resiliency forum, driving genuine challenge and alignment rather than status review. Produce reporting to the Global Risk Committee and the Board that carries a clear point of view and prompts decisions. Establish decision frameworks, escalation thresholds, and exception governance that hold under regulatory and partner scrutiny.
Get Ahead of Change, New Products, and New Markets: Own risk assessment for new products, partners, markets, and platform capabilities, including emerging asset classes, tokenized securities, and international market entry. Build a change risk process that accelerates safe launches rather than create unnecessary friction. Establish and run the RCSA program across a global, partner-dependent operating model. Serve as a risk advisor to Operations, Product, Security, and Engineering leaders throughout the product development lifecycle.
Set the Enterprise Standard and Assure Controls: Own the enterprise methodology every risk program conforms to, including taxonomy, rating scale, assessment approach, defense in depth control framework, and KRI design conventions. Build the operational control testing program covering ICOC and key operational controls, including methodology, sampling, deficiency classification, and remediation tracking to closure. Aggregate output from programs executed by other assurance functions into a single enterprise risk picture, and challenge results that do not reconcile. Own operational resiliency, business continuity, and disaster recovery, recognizing DriveWealth is itself critical infrastructure to its partners.
Close the Loop on Issues, Risk Events, and Indicators: Own enterprise issue management end to end, including methodology, intake, classification, corrective action, aging thresholds, and escalation. Build the risk event and loss database, lead root cause analysis on material events, and ensure learnings feed back into risk assessments and control design. Design a KRI framework tied to how the platform actually runs, including trade and settlement volume, availability, partner onboarding, and operational capacity.
Build AI-Native Tooling and Enablement for Risk Practices: Use automation and AI to move control testing from sample-based toward full-population where the data supports it, and to automate evidence collection and exception triage. Build risk tooling first-line owners genuinely want to use, and treat low adoption as a design failure rather than a compliance problem. Scale the program through tooling leverage rather than headcount.
Lead, Scale, and Develop the Team: Hire, coach, and develop a team of technically fluent risk professionals, setting a high bar for ownership, judgment, and execution. Build a risk champion network across first-line functions so the program scales through the business. Build a culture of bias for action, technical curiosity, and pragmatic risk decision-making. Represent Risk Management with regulators, auditors, and enterprise partners.