Fraud Researcher

Responsibilities

• Live Fraud Investigation & Reconstruction
• Lead investigations into complex fraud cases across identities, accounts, devices, and transaction surfaces
• Provide support to day-to-day fraud operations including SEVs and alert triage
• Reconstruct attacker sequences and hypothesize actor intent and tooling
• Distill patterns from noisy signals into clear narratives and actionable insights
• Bridge investigation outcomes to product and model improvements
• Signal & Tool Utilization at Scale
• Operate across Plaid's fraud tooling — dashboards, alerting systems, network signals, and analytics platforms — to detect and validate anomalies
• Stress-test existing capabilities, identify systemic gaps, and define new detection primitives
• Proactively identify gaps in internal fraud tooling and automation, driving enhancements to improve efficiency and scale
• Product & Model Partnership
• Collaborate with Data Science, ML/AI, and Product teams to improve labeling, feature sets, evaluation frameworks, and model decay monitoring
• Surface data quality limitations and systematically formalize missing features
• Translate exploratory research into reusable feature pipelines, model inputs, or rule augmentations
• Participate in product discovery, roadmap planning, and post-launch evaluation to ensure fraud-awareness by design
• Deep Applied Fraud Research
• Conduct longitudinal and structural analysis of how fraud types manifest in Plaid network data — entity linkages, temporal patterns, attack rotations, tool chains
• Experiment with network/graph analysis, sequence mining, anomaly detection, and custom heuristics where off-the-shelf approaches fail
• Ecosystem Monitoring & Knowledge Leadership
• Continuously survey external fraud trends, adversary techniques, tooling, and emerging threat vectors
• Proactively perform threat modeling of abuse surfaces and initiate research proposals when patterns emerge
• Case Studies & Reporting
• Produce clear, evidence-backed technical reports and case studies for product, engineering, operations, legal, and executive stakeholders
• Document investigation workflows, attack classifications, and proof-of-concept detection logic
• Drive post-incident learning by capturing lessons from fraud incidents and feeding them back into defenses

Qualifications

• 3+ years of applied fraud experience in a high-velocity environment (fintech, consumer payments, banking, SaaS, marketplace risk, or security research)
• Investigator mindset: pattern synthesis, hypothesis testing, and skilled triage between signal and noise
• Post-containment incident response experience with a deep emphasis on post-mortems and root cause analysis
• Dark and grey-web navigation and investigation experience; ability to assess source credibility and translate external intelligence into actionable insights
• Tool fluency with data environments and investigative toolchains (BI tools, anomaly detection, case trackers)

Preferred

• SQL for deep data querying and exploratory analysis
• Python for scripting, rapid prototyping, and analytical workflows
• Graph/network analysis experience to detect linked behavioral structures or actor networks
• Familiarity with rule engines, signal gating, and large-scale monitoring systems
• Experience applying AI tools and agents to accelerate investigations and research workflows
• Ability to translate fraud research into actionable signals, rules, or labeled datasets that improve model performance

Nice to Have

• Fraud domain certifications (e.g., CFE)
• Prior work on consumer identity, payments, or risk platform development
• Exposure to production ML model lifecycles and metrics for drift/decay
• Experience improving internal fraud tooling, automation, or case management systems