Senior Manager, Risk & Compliance Operations

Forward•Austin, TX

About The Position

Forward is an embedded finance company seeking a Senior Manager, Risk & Compliance Operations to run operational cadence across its Onboarding, Transaction Monitoring, and Merchant Maintenance pods and establish governance frameworks that scale human judgment. The role turns strategic risk frameworks into practical operating procedures and promotes disciplined, consistent execution across teams. The Senior Manager owns weekly operating rhythms, pod-level service levels, escalation triage, cross-pod handoffs, case routing, and leadership visibility into blockers and root causes. The role designs and implements a control framework, including the Risk Appetite Statement, Delegation of Authority matrix, Control Inventory, L2 Governance framework, and continuous audit management. The position owns core operational risk policies and ensures they are maintained, followed, and adapted as the business scales. It also establishes repeatable partner and merchant risk assessment processes, maintains merchant risk classification, oversees high-risk merchant decisions, and leads fraud governance and significant incident response. The Senior Manager partners with pod leads on judgment calls and policy interpretation, and works with Data Science and Transaction Monitoring on rule design and tuning. The role is based in Austin, TX. Forward offers a competitive salary and equity package, comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits, flexible work arrangements, generous PTO, and a learning and development budget. The position also offers the opportunity to help define ML architecture and model governance standards as the company scales decisioning.

Requirements

At least 5 years in risk operations, fraud operations, or compliance operations at a fintech, payments, or banking organization.
Direct experience building operational discipline—such as SLAs, escalation matrices, or control frameworks—from a partial or immature state.
Deep knowledge of payments and risk, including KYC/KYB, transaction monitoring, AML/BSA, chargeback and dispute processes, merchant risk tiering, and network program rules.
Documented experience building or operating a risk appetite statement, control inventory, Delegation of Authority matrix, or L2 governance framework.
Ability to lead through process, policy, and cadence and mentor others on judgment calls without taking over their work.
Data literacy, including comfort reading risk dashboards, SLA reports, and loss reports, and using SQL queries to identify anomalies.
Clear written and oral communication for internal audiences such as executives, board members, and pod leads, and external audiences such as auditors and regulators.
Strong operational rigor, with the ability to build consistent systems, predictable escalation paths, enforceable policies, and meaningful SLAs.

Nice To Haves

Experience at a scaled payments provider.
Prior fraud or incident command experience, including leading or co-leading investigation and remediation of fraud outbreaks or significant operational incidents.
Experience moving operational systems from ad hoc to repeatable processes and building playbooks that are followed.
Financial crime background covering fraud, money laundering, account takeover, and controls designed to detect organized schemes.
Banking or embedded finance exposure, including deposit account operations or consumer protection rules.

Responsibilities

Own the weekly operating rhythm across Onboarding, Transaction Monitoring, and Merchant Maintenance, including standups, escalation triage, decision logs, and surfacing blockers to Leadership.
Set and track pod-level SLAs, including time to first touch, case resolution cycles, dispute response time, and payout cycles; identify SLA gaps and escalate root causes.
Lead escalation triage for cases outside standard pod workflows, determining ownership, timelines, and approval chains.
Coordinate cross-pod handoffs and maintain case-routing logic as the business scales.
Own the Risk Appetite Statement and operationalize risk thresholds as SLAs in coordination with Leadership and Finance.
Build and maintain the Delegation of Authority matrix for merchant boarding, limit exceptions, high-risk overrides, and settlement decisions, ensuring segregation of duties.
Complete and maintain the Control Inventory, document controls, map them to risk categories and regulatory requirements, and establish testing cadences.
Lead deployment of the L2 Governance Framework, including its policy layer, threshold tuning, escalation matrix, and decisioning-engine integration.
Establish ongoing audit management for PCI, sponsor bank, and network audits, including continuous evidence collection and a control testing calendar.
Own and maintain operational policies for risk assessment, underwriting, sanctions and KYC/KYB, merchant termination, and incident response.
Ensure policies are enforced, identify and remediate gaps, and align pod leads on policy interpretation.
Stand up a standardized partner risk assessment process, including a classification framework, checklist, and escalation path.
Own merchant risk classification, including scoring methodology, tier definitions, and triggers for Enhanced Due Diligence, conditions, or termination.
Lead oversight and escalation decisions for high-risk merchants and represent Risk's position in business discussions.
Establish fraud governance, acceptable loss thresholds, and incident response procedures for fraud outbreaks.
Partner with the Data Scientist and Transaction Monitoring pod to design and validate monitoring rules, tune false-positive rates, and ensure alerts surface appropriately.
Lead investigation, containment, and remediation of significant fraud incidents and ensure regulatory notification requirements, including SARs, are met.
Serve as the operational anchor for pod leads on judgment calls, process questions, and policy interpretation.
Promote consistent risk judgment across pods through policy, cadence, and escalation discipline.