Director, Payments Risk

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Director, Payments Risk based in Canada. This role offers the opportunity to lead payments risk strategy within a rapidly scaling payments and fintech environment. You will own the risk agenda, balancing fraud prevention, operational resilience, customer experience, and sustainable business growth. Reporting to the VP of Payments, you will shape the people, processes, controls, and technology that support responsible payments expansion. The position combines strategic leadership with hands-on involvement in complex risk decisions, incidents, and operational execution. You will partner closely with Product, Engineering, Finance, and Data teams to embed risk considerations into business and product decisions. As an autonomous and systems-minded leader, you will also drive automation and develop a high-performing risk organization. Accountabilities: - Develop and evolve the payments risk strategy, identifying the most significant risks, defining priorities, and translating the overall risk agenda into a practical roadmap. - Define risk coverage for new products and capabilities by identifying emerging risks, designing controls and monitoring mechanisms, and establishing appropriate success criteria before launch. - Maintain and evolve risk appetite and control frameworks, making informed decisions about when controls should be strengthened or adjusted based on data, risk exposure, and business needs. - Identify opportunities for risk management to support customer value and business growth while protecting customers and the organization from financial and operational downside. - Lead day-to-day risk operations, including team queues, escalation workflows, complex cases, operational routines, and decisions that fall outside established playbooks.

- Monitor fraud and risk patterns, tune rules and controls, review cases when trends change, and use false positives and missed detections as signals for continuous improvement. - Establish and maintain incident-readiness frameworks, including playbooks, escalation paths, and decision processes for fraud spikes, emerging attack vectors, and payment-processing anomalies. - Partner with Product and Engineering to integrate risk requirements into product roadmaps and collaborate with Finance and Data teams to establish reliable dashboards, reporting, and risk intelligence. - Monitor portfolio-level losses and provide risk perspectives for forecasting, business cases, product launches, pricing decisions, and partner evaluations. - Act as a subject-matter resource across the organization, helping non-specialist teams understand payments risk and its impact on customer experience, sales, support, and operations. - Drive automation and AI-enabled tooling so the team can focus on exceptions and complex decisions rather than manual volume management. - Evaluate and implement new tools, processes, and technologies that improve the scalability and effectiveness of payments risk operations. - Lead, coach, and develop the Risk team, establishing clear expectations, strengthening capabilities, and fostering accountability, initiative, and continuous improvement. Requirements: - 8+ years of experience in payments and/or fintech, including at least 3 years leading teams and owning business outcomes. - Deep hands-on knowledge of the payments lifecycle, including onboarding, underwriting, processing, settlement, reconciliation, and disputes. - Strong experience with Stripe or comparable payments infrastructure, particularly within software platforms that carry payments-related liability. - Demonstrated experience building or operating fraud and risk programs, including detection systems, monitoring, controls, and risk-management frameworks.