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Head of Risk

Modern Treasury· Legal
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Hybrid (San Francisco)$200k - $285kFull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Head of Risk to build Modern Treasury's risk function from the ground up, shaping onboarding, underwriting, transaction risk, reserves, detection, and new rails (stablecoins, wallets, local rails) with a hands-on, foundational approach.

Responsibilities

  • Onboarding & underwriting: evaluate customers before they move money, determine necessary information and conditions, and partner with Compliance on KYB while owning underwriting judgment.
  • Transaction risk & limits: authorize real-time money movement and adapt limits as we learn about a business, including dynamic limits for high-volume customers.
  • Reserves & exposure: define reserve policy and assess loss exposure across ACH returns, unauthorized debits, and counterparty failure; quantify exposure and communicate decisions.
  • Detection & the risk engine: select and deploy tooling (vendor, in-house, or both) to automate decisions and leverage AI for case handling.
  • New rails, stablecoins & wallet controls: expand into stablecoins, wallets, RfP, and local rails in other countries with safe, usable controls and risk considerations across rails.
  • Collaborate across Engineering, Product, Compliance, Finance, and customer-facing teams to ensure risk and compliance run on a single coherent system.

Qualifications

  • You've built a risk function at an early-stage or high-growth company, not inherited a mature one.
  • Payments risk, specifically ACH returns, settlement timing, unauthorized debit exposure, and counterparty risk; understanding of risk vs. compliance.
  • Curiosity about new rails: stablecoins, wallets, RfP, international rails; ability to translate unique risks into product and operational controls.
  • A systems thinker with experience designing for scale and edge cases.
  • Technical and data fluency: comfortable with SQL, Python, and applying AI tools to operational problems.
  • Experience with dealing with fraud or loss events and ability to articulate rationale for decisions.
  • Ability to defend judgment and communicate tradeoffs clearly; able to influence across the company.
  • Management experience is a plus, with potential to hire and build a team over time.

Skills

Required:risk managementpayments knowledgedata fluency

Benefits

  • Generous benefits and company equity
Last updated Aug 27, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Modern Treasury

Payment operations tools for money movement.

Modern Treasury offers tools that automate the full cycle of money movement—from payment initiation, through approvals, to reconciliation—and are accessible through web application or API.

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