Senior Risk Analyst

About the Role

Truss is a regulated fintech that handles real bank accounts, real money movement, cards, payables, and receivables. Risk is central to the business: every dollar moved requires a fast, sharp, and defensible decision—onboard or don’t, pay or hold, release or review. The Senior Risk Analyst will work as an individual contributor in the queues, the rules, and the loss curve, investigating fraud and abuse, tuning controls, and partnering with product and engineering to ensure good merchants get paid while bad actors are stopped. This is a hands‑on IC role for someone with prior payments or fintech experience who wants to work in Austin, close to the product team.

Responsibilities

• Investigate and disposition risk by working merchant and transaction queues covering payment fraud, check fraud, account takeover, synthetic identity, mule activity, first‑party abuse, and edge cases in ACH, wires, cards, and payouts; clear cases with crisp, defensible reasoning.
• Tune rules and signals: propose and test rule changes, velocity checks, identity and device signals, and review thresholds; measure precision/recall and dollar‑weighted impact.
• Own detection → review → action loops to keep queues from becoming black holes; document dispositions so they feed back into policy and automation; escalate patterns that need product or engineering fixes.
• Partner with product, engineering, and compliance teams, sitting with those who ship onboarding, ledger, payments, and cards; coordinate BSA/AML‑ and OFAC‑aware patterns with compliance without outsourcing judgment to a PDF.
• Protect the business and the customer by balancing false positives (which kill good contractors) and false negatives (which kill the company); trade loss rate, approval rate, and ops cost with eyes open.

Requirements

• 3–4+ years of experience in fraud, payments risk, merchant risk, or trust & safety at a fintech, payments, or banking company, ideally in a production queue/rules environment.
• Hands‑on fluency in how money moves and how it gets stolen: ACH, wires, checks, cards, account funding, payouts, and common abuse patterns.
• Comfort with SQL (or similar) to pull cases, segment risk, and measure rule performance.
• Clear written judgment: ability to explain why a case was held, released, or escalated.
• Bias toward ownership in a small team—take the case, make the call, and follow the metric.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. (no sponsorship).
• Based in Austin, TX (in‑person).

Nice to Haves

• Experience with tools like Sift, Alloy, Unit21, or a homegrown rules/decisioning stack.
• Exposure to KYC/KYB quality, transaction monitoring, or sponsor‑bank/program‑manager expectations.
• Experience living through a real fraud spike or bank‑partner fire drill and helping to fix it.
• Enough Python (or similar) to prototype analyses quickly.