Senior Fraud Research Analyst

Plaid

We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam. We are the first line of defense against fraud and abuse on the Plaid platform. Our mission is to ensure the safety and integrity of our platform for consumers and customers. As a Fraud and Abuse Operations Analyst, you will be responsible for responding to fraud and abuse events, investigating claims, and triaging incidents. We also partner with product and engineering teams to inform and improve fraud mitigation strategies. Responsibilities: * Safeguard Plaid's Platform: Participate in the abuse on-call rotation, directly protecting our users and customers by responding to and resolving fraud and abuse events. Your timely actions will be instrumental in maintaining trust and security. * Drive Investigations and Mitigate Risks: Investigate fraud and abuse claims from diverse sources, partnering with senior teammates on complex cases. Your findings will inform decisions and strategies, directly impacting Plaid's ability to prevent future incidents and minimize financial losses. Proactively perform threat modeling of abuse surfaces and continuously survey external fraud trends, adversary techniques, tooling, and emerging threat vectors * Support Incident Response: Help triage and manage fraud and abuse events as internal incidents (SEVs), collaborating across teams to drive resolution. Your contributions in these situations will minimize disruption and protect Plaid's reputation. * Inform Product Strategy: Partner with Consumer Risk and other product teams, providing operational insights from on-call and investigations. Your contributions will help inform the development of effective fraud mitigation solutions and strengthen Plaid's defenses. Qualifications: 3+ years of experience in fraud/abuse operations, trust & safety, and/or incident response * Incident response and investigations: * Experience triaging fraud or related incidents, with tight containment deadlines. * Experience managing escalations and making informed trade-off decisions with multiple stakeholders. * Ability to coordinate and communicate effectively with internal Legal, Compliance, Comms and other risk management teams during incident triage. * A battle-tested mental model for balancing fraud mitigation vs. conversion, and the ability to calibrate and apply this mental model in the context of Plaid’s business objectives under pressure. * Fraud and abuse detection and prevention context: * Working knowledge of fraud typologies–account takeover, different types of payments fraud, ACH fraud, chargebacks, kiting, rewards harvesting, etc. * Familiarity with the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by bad actors to commit different types of fraud on the web. * Familiarity with common mitigation strategies for the same, with a developing point of view on their relative pros and cons. * Fraud and abuse intelligence: * Dark and grey-web navigation and investigation experience, ability to assess source credibility, and translate external intelligence into actionable insights. * Experience translating fraud investigations and research into actionable detection signals, rules, and labeled datasets, while partnering closely with DS/ML and product teams to improve feature sets, labeling quality, evaluation frameworks, and model decay monitoring. * Experience developing and maintaining threat models for authentication and other high-risk product surfaces, with a track record of proactively identifying emerging risks. * Data analysis skills: * Proficiency with SQL for querying data sets and building reports. * Comfortable with common analysis tools and manipulation tools. * Ability to spot anomalies and fraudulent patterns in logs and other data sets (transactions, request data, etc.), with judgment to escalate ambiguous cases. * Operational depth and maturity: * Experience contributing improvements to operational processes and controls. * Strong written and verbal communication skills. Nice-to-Haves: * Familiarity with machine learning models for fraud detection. * Fraud domain certifications (e.g., CFE/fraud examination background). * Exposure to production ML model lifecycles and metrics for drift/decay. * Effective use of AI and AI agents to accelerate investigations and research   Our mission at Plaid is to unlock financial freedom for everyone. To support that mission, we seek to build a diverse team of driven individuals who care deeply about making the financial ecosystem more equitable. We recognize that strong qualifications can come from both prior work experiences and lived experiences. We encourage you to apply to a role even if your experience doesn't fully match the job description. We are always looking for team members that will bring something unique to Plaid! Plaid is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, ethnicity, religion or religious belief, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, military or veteran status, disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Plaid is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance with your application or interviews due to a disability, please let us know at accommodations@plaid.com. Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice here. Additional compensation in the form(s) of equity and/or commission are dependent on the position offered. Plaid provides a comprehensive benefit plan, including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k). Pay is based on factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience and skillset, and location. Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefit plans.

Plaid

We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam. Plaid’s Consumer team owns all of Plaid’s consumer facing surfaces. This includes Link, Plaid’s flagship product, which has been used by over half of all US adults to share their information safely and securely with financial applications. Link drives the vast majority of Plaid’s revenue. We’re also working on some exciting, 0-1 consumer initiatives. Both areas are top business priorities. As part of Plaid’s first Consumer team, you will lead product development and execution within a startup-like environment at Plaid. Responsibilities * Define an ambitious vision / roadmap, sign up for quarterly / half year goals, and partner with the cross-functional team to hit them * Drive prioritization and execution (build, measure, iterate) * Identify opportunities through consumer feedback and staying close to our data / dashboards * Partner with cross-functional team (design, research, data science, legal, and compliance) to do all of the above Qualifications * You have successfully launched large consumer facing features driving meaningful outcomes at B2C companies * You start with the consumer problem and have held a high bar for consumer experience * You naturally gravitate towards using data to make strategic decisions * You have communicated complex concepts succinctly for broad audiences to drive decisions * You have driven roadmap and prioritization exercises and driven clear impact through your decisions * You thrive in a culture of high ownership, velocity, and throughput, and speak your mind regardless of level * You have a track record of scrappily developing clear perspectives in areas of ambiguity Nice to have * Experience building anti-fraud or ML-driven products Our mission at Plaid is to unlock financial freedom for everyone. To support that mission, we seek to build a diverse team of driven individuals who care deeply about making the financial ecosystem more equitable. We recognize that strong qualifications can come from both prior work experiences and lived experiences. We encourage you to apply to a role even if your experience doesn't fully match the job description. We are always looking for team members that will bring something unique to Plaid! Plaid is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, ethnicity, religion or religious belief, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, military or veteran status, disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Plaid is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance with your application or interviews due to a disability, please let us know at accommodations@plaid.com. Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice here. Additional compensation in the form(s) of equity and/or commission are dependent on the position offered. Plaid provides a comprehensive benefit plan, including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k). Pay is based on factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience and skillset, and location. Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefit plans.

Plaid

We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam. The Embedded Insights team builds machine learning models to enable better internal decision making and to power the Plaid product suite. We are structured as a central team of MLEs and Data Scientists, and embed with partner teams to bring ML models to life. As the first Data Scientist on Plaid’s Embedded Insights team within the Data organization, you will play a foundational role in building the analytics and measurement framework that supports a broad portfolio of internal and customer-facing products. You will partner closely with product, engineering, and machine learning teams to drive data-informed decision making, evaluate product and model performance, and contribute directly to the health and growth of the Plaid network. In this role, you will analyze entities across the Plaid network to better understand behavior patterns and develop metrics and monitoring systems that identify anomalies and emerging risks. You will create dashboards and reporting frameworks that provide clear visibility into machine learning model performance, while also evaluating the impact and value of these models on both customer and internal datasets. A key part of your work will involve translating complex analyses into compelling, actionable narratives for technical and business stakeholders. You will design and analyze experiments, communicate findings across teams, and use data-driven insights to uncover opportunities to improve existing products and expand Plaid’s offerings. Responsibilities: * Applying your expertise in quantitative analysis, data mining, and data visualization to keep the Plaid network safe and improve our product suite. * Informing and influencing product and engineering teams through your data analysis and presentations. * Making long-term data science roadmap decisions like how machine learning and data science iteration should be done at Plaid. * Championing a data-first approach toward decision-making across the entire organization. Qualifications: * 5+ years of industry experience in a Data Science role. * Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience in Computer Science, Statistics. Engineering, Economics, or a closely related field. * Experience with Payment Risk, Fraud or Trust & Safety. * Deep familiarity with SQL and data visualization tools. * Understanding of modern machine learning techniques, such as classification, clustering, optimization. * Proven ability to tailor your solutions to business problems in a cross-functional team. * Ability to code and iterate independently in Python to conduct exploratory data analysis. * Experience building data pipelines in DBT or Airflow is a plus. Our mission at Plaid is to unlock financial freedom for everyone. To support that mission, we seek to build a diverse team of driven individuals who care deeply about making the financial ecosystem more equitable. We recognize that strong qualifications can come from both prior work experiences and lived experiences. We encourage you to apply to a role even if your experience doesn't fully match the job description. We are always looking for team members that will bring something unique to Plaid! Plaid is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, ethnicity, religion or religious belief, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, military or veteran status, disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Plaid is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance with your application or interviews due to a disability, please let us know at accommodations@plaid.com. Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice here. Additional compensation in the form(s) of equity and/or commission are dependent on the position offered. Plaid provides a comprehensive benefit plan, including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k). Pay is based on factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience and skillset, and location. Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefit plans.