Senior Payment Risk Analyst

Job description

ABOUT POLYMARKET Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market platform. We enable individuals to express views on real-world events by trading on outcomes across politics, economics, sports, culture, and current affairs. Built as a peer-to-peer marketplace, Polymarket aggregates diverse opinions into transparent, market-based probabilities that reflect collective expectations about the future. We're growing fast, both in terms of volume ($21B traded in 2025) and adoption as an alternative news source. Our ambition is to become a ubiquitous beacon of truth in global media and we need your help adding fuel to the fire. ABOUT THE ROLE Polymarket operates as a CFTC-regulated prediction market exchange, which means money movement is not a back-office function. It is core infrastructure. Deposits, withdrawals, and settlement payouts happen at high volume and accelerate dramatically around major real-world events. The Senior Payment Risk Analyst role exists to own the risk posture around all of it: how money gets onto the platform, how it moves across it, and how it leaves. This is a senior / contributor role on the Payments Risk team within the US Exchange. You will sit at the intersection of fraud operations, payment rail mechanics, and regulatory compliance. Day to day, that means investigating live cases, monitoring transaction data, writing and tuning fraud rules, and maintaining the banking, card network, and processor relationships that depend on us keeping our house in order. You will work closely with Compliance, Engineering, Legal and InfoSec. When you identify a control gap, you are expected to close it, not just document it. The challenge here is real. Payment volumes can spike by an order of magnitude in hours when a major market goes live. Fraud patterns shift fast. Regulatory expectations are high and still evolving. If you want a role where the risk environment is stable and well-understood, this is not it. If you want to build the payment risk function at a company that is redefining how people engage with information and markets, read on. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Investigate live payment fraud cases across deposits, withdrawals, and settlement payouts, making timely decisions on holds, reversals, and account actions. - Monitor transaction data for anomalies tied to high-volume market events, distinguishing normal volume spikes from genuine abuse signals. - Write and tune fraud detection rules in response to emerging patterns, using transaction data to set thresholds you can defend quantitatively. - Identify control gaps across the full payment stack, then work directly with Engineering, Compliance and InfoSec to get those gaps closed. - Own relationships with payment processors, card networks, and banking partners on risk-related matters, including chargeback disputes, ratio management, and compliance inquiries. - Produce clear, well-reasoned risk memos and committee-level reporting that translate payment risk findings into decisions for non-risk stakeholders. - Maintain and improve the team's core fraud and payment risk documentation, including policies, runbooks, and week-over-week metric tracking. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 8 or more years of hands-on experience in payments risk, fraud risk, or transaction monitoring at a fintech, exchange, payments company, bank, or comparable regulated financial services business. - Direct experience with ACH, wire, card networks (Visa and Mastercard), and at least one real-time payment rail (RTP or FedNow), including their dispute mechanics, chargeback rules, and associated fraud patterns. - Working knowledge of BSA/AML fundamentals and how payments risk and AML risk overlap, including SAR filing, structuring detection, and transaction monitoring systems. - Demonstrated experience setting quantitative risk thresholds, such as velocity limits and chargeback ratios, and defending those decisions to internal stakeholders, processors, banks, and card networks. - Strong written communication skills. This role produces risk memos and reporting for senior stakeholders on a regular basis. You need to write clearly and argue a position well. - Experience auditing a payment stack end to end, identifying where controls are missing or miscalibrated, and building the case for what needs to change. - (Plus) Familiarity with CFTC-regulated environments or other derivatives/exchange contexts. - (Plus) Experience working in a high-growth environment where payment volumes scale quickly and the risk surface changes fast. - (Plus) Exposure to crypto or blockchain-adjacent payment flows. BENEFITS - Competitive salary & equity - Unlimited PTO - Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage - 401k match - Hardware setup: new MacBook Pro, big display, & accessories