Director of Payments & Risk

Company Overview

Coinme is transforming access to financial services in the digital era by merging advanced blockchain technology with user-friendly solutions. As the largest cryptocurrency kiosk network with over 40,000 locations nationwide, Coinme facilitates crypto adoption through an easy mobile app, secure digital wallet, and decentralized finance integrations. Beyond consumer offerings, the company powers crypto infrastructure for businesses through its Crypto-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform, enabling rapid crypto capability launches with modular API-driven licensing and compliance.

Role Summary

The Payments & Risk team at Coinme safeguards transaction security, dispute resolution, and fraud prevention across various channels. The Director of Payments & Risk is accountable for the overall fraud defense strategy, overseeing AI-enhanced operations and leading the team managing these functions. This multi-faceted player-coach role involves architecting fraud defenses across multiple systems, maintaining hands-on engagement in analyzing controls’ effectiveness, and fostering AI-driven workflows that reduce operational burdens while ensuring auditability and team autonomy. You will also manage the financial impacts of risk including losses and recoveries.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the comprehensive fraud risk strategy and defense architecture covering vendor engines, internal safeguards, processor gates, and partnering banks, maintaining detailed mappings of system decision rights.
• Manage detection systems by optimizing rules, models, thresholds, and velocity limits to balance false positives with fraud detection, applying stringent change controls and monitoring.
• Oversee chargeback and dispute economics, including strategy, pre-dispute deflection signals, reporting on recovery rates, and monitoring card-network standings.
• Direct fraud investigations and incident responses with evidence-based processes, reconstructing decision pathways, differentiating system errors from valid controls, defending legitimate declines, and turning incidents into corrective actions.
• Design and supervise AI-based risk operations workflows with rigorous quality assurance, human oversight on critical decisions, transparent reasoning records, and clearly defined automation boundaries.
• Recruit, mentor, and expand the risk team, training analysts and scientists to effectively operate and improve AI-driven workflows with comprehensive documentation and runbooks.
• Champion root-cause resolution in cross-functional payment flows and customer journeys by influencing fixes outside the risk function and collaborating closely with compliance teams.
• Manage vendor and partner relationships tactically and commercially, including integrations, SLAs, escalations, and roadmap influence, aligning risk postures with processing and banking partners.
• Regularly report to executive leadership on key risk mitigation efforts, detailing performance metrics, loss exposures, decline precision, dispute success rates, automation coverage, and turnaround times, linking decisions to business profitability.

Success Indicators Within 6-12 Months

• Maintain or improve loss metrics, chargeback rates, and card-network compliance during leadership transition.
• Exhibit strong crisis decision-making skills with rapid responsive actions.
• Establish the AI-driven risk operation as a product owned and evolved by the team without single points of failure.
• Have the team fully operational, independently resolving investigations within service level agreements and producing defensible documentation.
• Implement process improvements addressing identified gaps, with stable vendor and processor partnerships operating via structured reviews.
• Deliver standing executive reports that quantitatively link risk management to profitability metrics.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• At least 8 years in payments risk, fraud, or dispute operations within financial services or cryptocurrency, with over 3 years in a leadership role in risk or trust and safety, preferably at a crypto exchange or on/off-ramp.
• In-depth knowledge of card-rail processes, chargeback economics, Visa/Mastercard dispute guidelines, ACH and real-time payment systems, and cryptocurrency risk including wallet behaviors and cash-out tactics.
• Hands-on experience managing contemporary fraud prevention platforms (e.g., Sardine, SEON, Sift, Kount, Forter), including rule development, testing, and critical evaluation of fraud controls.
• Proficient in SQL and comfortable working independently with log analysis, observability tools, and analytics platforms to answer complex questions.
• Proven leadership in developing AI-enhanced operational workflows with well-defined automation boundaries and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.
• Ability to build resilient institutional knowledge with thorough documentation and cross-training that ensures function sustainability beyond individual tenure.
• Strong cross-team influence skills to address root causes in other systems rather than relying on downstream compensations.
• Demonstrated success in hiring, developing, and retaining risk analysts and managing change driven by AI integration.
• Excellent judgment prioritizing evidence-based decisions, conservative metrics, balanced customer protection, and effective communication to both technical and executive audiences.

Preferred Skills and Certifications

• Familiarity with Sardine platform and card processor integrations like TabaPay.
• Knowledge of threat-informed defense frameworks tailored to fraud (e.g., MITRE ATT&CK, AADAPT, F3).
• Experience with blockchain analytics tools such as TRM Labs, Chainalysis, or Elliptic and wallet clustering investigations.
• Understanding of BSA/AML regulations and SAR processes, including evidence handling and collaboration with compliance teams on account policies.
• Experience with large language model agent frameworks or workflow automation platforms.
• Exposure to modern data stacks such as dbt, data warehousing, and product analytics.
• Relevant certifications (e.g., CFE, CAMS, FRM) or advanced degrees in related fields.

Work Culture

The company emphasizes data-driven decision-making with an audit trail for all modifications, aggressively protecting legitimate customers alongside fraud prevention, and integrating AI tools as fundamental components of risk management, not as optional extras.