Risk Strategist

As a Risk Strategist, you’ll own projects end-to-end, analyzing fraud trends, backtesting and optimizing fraud rules, and collaborating closely with Risk Operations, Customer Experience, Product, Engineering, and Data to strengthen our defenses. You’ll turn insights into rules, processes, and systems that protect our customers and directly influence how we detect and prevent fraud while ensuring a seamless, trusted experience.

At Relay, your work has real reach – helping millions of SMBs operate safely and confidently. If you’re passionate about using data to solve meaningful problems, shaping risk strategy, and making a tangible impact, this is the role for you.

What You’ll Be Doing

Risk Strategy: Own the design and optimization of rules and strategies that balance fraud prevention, operational efficiency, and a seamless customer experience

Data-Driven: Analyze onboarding, account, and transaction data to uncover emerging fraud patterns, vulnerabilities, and growth opportunities

Design & Optimization: Develop, test, and tune fraud rules across customer touchpoints (onboarding, payments, account usage) to protect customers and reduce false positives

Impact Measurement: Backtest rule changes to assess effects on fraud rates, customer experience, and operational workload

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with Product and Engineering to embed fraud controls in new features and products

Risk Operations Partnership: Work closely with Risk Ops to ensure risk decisions are actionable, efficient, and scalable

Tooling & Vendor Management: Implement automation, fraud tools, and external data sources to strengthen the risk engine

Continuous Improvement: Monitor performance post-deployment, iterating rules and strategies to drive ongoing optimization

Stakeholder Communication: Translate insights into clear recommendations for technical and non-technical stakeholders, aligning risk decisions with business objectives

Who You Are

You have 2+ years of experience in fraud, risk strategy, or data analysis, preferably in fintech, banking, or payments

You’re proficient in SQL (joins, aggregations, window functions, subqueries) and can write efficient queries with minimal supervision

You’re analytical and curious, digging into trends to understand the “why” and using data to shape smarter fraud rules

You own projects from start to finish, defining the problem, diving into data, and driving solutions to completion

You’re a strong communicator, translating complex insights into clear, actionable recommendations for technical and non-technical stakeholders

You’re collaborative and know how to navigate cross-functional work with Risk Operations, Customer Experience, Product, Engineering, and Data

You’re developing risk intuition, understanding not just what works, but why each decision drives downstream impact

You thrive in fast-paced environments, tackling challenges, optimizing processes, and raising the bar across the team

You’re actively using AI tools in how you work today and you’re excited to push what’s possible with them