Senior Merchant Underwriter, Risk Operations

Job description

**Role Overview:** We’re looking for an experienced Merchant Underwriter to join ClarityPay’s Merchant Risk Operations team and own the human-judgment layer of our merchant underwriting process. For more than two years, we’ve underwritten merchants through a workflow that is now largely AI-driven: it gathers and processes merchant information, synthesizes the findings, benchmarks each merchant against our history of previously underwritten merchants, and produces a recommendation - escalating the points that need human review or judgment. Automation handles most of the work, but as our merchant network grows, so does the number of cases that need an expert review. You’ll make those decisions: working on the edge cases, weighing conflicting signals across merchant-provided information, financial statements, public profiles, and litigation history, and providing the final sign-off. You’ll also help sharpen the workflow itself, so your decisions make the system escalate smarter over time. **Key Responsibilities:** **Escalated Underwriting Review & Decisioning** - Review merchant cases escalated by our AI underwriting workflow, validating its findings and recommendations, and resolving the specific points flagged for human judgment. - Provide final underwriting sign-off - approve, decline, or approve with conditions - within defined service levels and ClarityPay’s risk appetite. - Handle the most complex, sensitive, or high-exposure merchant cases, exercising independent judgment within established credit and risk policy. - Document clear, defensible decision rationale for every case you sign off. - Manage a queue of escalated cases, prioritizing exposure and urgency to meet turnaround targets for merchant onboarding and re-underwriting. **Merchant Due Diligence & Financial Analysis** - Conduct hands-on review of merchant information across direct merchant submissions, business verification (KYB) and beneficial ownership, credit reports, public profiles and adverse media, and lawsuits, liens, and judgments. - Analyze financial statements and bank data to assess liquidity, profitability, leverage, and the merchant’s capacity to absorb refunds, chargebacks, and losses. - Evaluate business model, fulfillment and delivery risk, and industry risk to size ClarityPay’s counterparty exposure to each merchant. - Recommend exposure limits, reserves, holdbacks, and other risk mitigants, with clearly documented rationale. **Ongoing Monitoring & Re-Underwriting** - Perform periodic re-underwriting and review escalated monitoring alerts, flagging material changes in merchant performance or risk profile. - Incorporate dispute, chargeback, refund, and complaint trends into merchant risk assessments and decisions. - Partner with Servicing, Compliance, and merchant-facing teams on merchants requiring remediation, limit changes, or offboarding. **Workflow & Automation Improvement** - Provide structured feedback on the AI workflow recommendations so escalation logic, rules, and benchmarks improve over time. - Identify recurring edge cases and recommend policy, data sources, or automation that can be refined to reduce unnecessary escalations. - Contribute to underwriting policy, playbooks, SOPs, and decision guidelines that raise consistency across reviewers. **Quality, Compliance & Documentation** - Maintain accurate, audit-ready underwriting records - documents reviewed, findings, decisions, conditions, and approvals - in our case management system. - Ensure every decision complies with ClarityPay credit and risk policy and applicable federal and state regulations, including KYB/AML and sanctions requirements. - Participate in peer calibration and quality reviews so that decisions stay consistent across underwriters and with historical precedent. **What We’re Looking For:** - **Experience:** 5–10 years of hands-on merchant underwriting or counterparty risk experience at a merchant acquirer, payment processor, payment facilitator, merchant network, BNPL/fintech lender, or other organization exposed to merchant counterparty risk, including direct responsibility for underwriting decisions or final sign-off. We also welcome candidates from banks, commercial lenders, or specialty finance who have underwritten business financing, trade, or merchant-facing credit deals and can show the judgment this role requires. - **Risk Operations Background:** Experience in a risk operations function where automated or rules-based processes handle routine underwriting and edge cases are escalated to you for review and final sign-off. - **Underwriting Expertise:** Deep, hands-on review of merchant files - KYB and beneficial ownership, financial statements, credit reports, public records, litigation, and adverse media - and the judgment to reach a decision when signals conflict. - **Financial Analysis:** Strong ability to read and interpret financial and bank statements, assess merchant solvency and liquidity, and size exposure limits, reserves, and holdbacks. - **Industry Knowledge:** Understanding of chargeback and dispute lifecycles, refund and future-delivery exposure, and merchant failure or bust-out risk; payments, merchant acquiring, BNPL, or commercial credit background preferred. - **Regulatory Awareness:** Working familiarity with KYB/AML, sanctions screening, and consumer-finance and payments regulations. - **Communication:** Excellent written communication, with the ability to document concise, defensible decisions and explain them to internal stakeholders, and to request and evaluate follow-up information from merchants when needed. - **Tools:** Comfort working with AI-assisted and automated decisioning tools, case management systems, and data sources such as credit bureaus, KYB providers, and public-records databases; strong Excel skills. - **Working Style:** Sound judgment, strong attention to detail, and the autonomy to own cases end-to-end in a fast-growing environment. - **Education:** Bachelor’s degree in finance, accounting, economics, business, or related field preferred. **Bonus Points:** - Experience helping design, train, or calibrate automated or AI-driven underwriting workflows, rules, or risk models. - Underwriting experience in future delivery or higher-risk verticals (e.g., travel, ticketing, subscriptions, or elective healthcare). - Working knowledge of SQL for self-serve analysis, or a relevant credential such as CAMS or credit/risk certification. **What We Offer:** - Competitive compensation and equity package - Collaborative office culture with a strong product mindset - Opportunities to grow, lead, and shape how AI and human judgment work together in underwriting at a fast-growing consumer finance company *ClarityPay is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran, marital status, or any other legally protected status.*