Head of Fraud & Risk Mitigation

About the Role
Head of Fraud & Risk Mitigation is Kasheesh's senior voice on fraud. They will set the direction of the function, own execution, and act as the go-to authority on fraud and risk mitigation as the company scales. This is a department of one and the person in this seat must have experience setting strategy, reporting to C-Suite and be comfortable with hands-on execution. They must also be commercially minded. In this role, they will treat protecting the debt facility from bad actors and manufactured spenders as a first-order priority while keeping friction for legitimate customers to a minimum.

All investigation workflows, dispute resolutions, data sharing practices, and risk controls must operate in full alignment with sponsor bank requirements, applicable card network rules, and federal consumer financial protection obligations including Reg E. This is a non-negotiable baseline, not a secondary consideration and this person must have direct experience operating inside that constraint, not just adjacent to it.

Responsibilities

• Set Kasheesh's fraud and risk strategy, ensuring that we proactively identify and preempt new fraud schemes before they cause substantial losses.
  
• Own all analytical reporting for the fraud and risk function — independently querying, building, and maintaining dashboards in Metabase and SQL, and working directly with large, complex datasets in Excel to surface trends and defend guardrail decisions.
• Translate emerging fraud tactics, technology shifts, and regulatory trends into specific input for the product roadmap, partnering with Product and Engineering to build safeguards.
• Own the analytical case behind fraud guardrails and thresholds — quantifying loss exposure as a percentage of transaction volume and defending every trade-off with data.
• Define and maintain risk policy and operational procedures that protect Kasheesh, its customers, and its sponsor bank relationships as transaction volume grows.
• Own sponsor bank risk reporting and audit coordination, and provide regular reporting to the C-suite on enterprise risk and mitigation strategy — including fraud loss rate and dispute win rates.
• Protect the debt facility and proactively manage manufactured spend, and coordinated bad-actor activity to  capacity to process legitimate transactions — treating this as a first-order business-continuity risk, not just a loss line item.
• Configure, optimize, and manage the performance of Sardine and internal risk models in partnership with Engineering and Data, refining rule logic as new fraud and manufactured-spend patterns emerge.
• Own the ongoing performance and management of Kasheesh's AI-driven fraud monitoring tooling including  troubleshooting issues, and adapting its logic as new fraud patterns emerge. 
  Identify early risk signals and take precautions rather than acting only after losses have already accumulated.
• Investigate accounts, transactions, and dispute or chargeback cases the AI flags as needing human judgment.

Qualifications

•Must have verifiable experience designing fraud and risk strategy for an organization, or was a strong secondin-command ready to own that strategy independently. The ideal candidate has driven a shift toward proactive fraud prevention rather than just responding to losses after the fact. 

•10-12+ years of risk management, fraud analysis, payments risk, trust & safety, or financial crime experience at a bank or fintech. 
• Strong analytical and quantitative mindset — advanced, hands-on proficiency in Metabase, SQL, and Excel, and comfortable working independently with large datasets, is a requirement.
• Strong understanding of the fintech regulatory environment, including KYC/AML, dispute and chargeback handling, and sponsor bank operating constraints.
• Experience designing investigation workflows, escalation thresholds, and automation in a high-volume payments or fintech environment.
• Senior gravitas and consensus-building ability — comfortable aligning Product, Engineering, and Customer Success stakeholders around a shared fraud strategy.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with direct experience reporting enterprise risk to the C-suite, sponsor bank partners, auditors, and other external counterparts.
• Direct, hands-on experience with Sardine or a comparable fraud/risk platform.
• Has hands-on experience building and using AI/automation tools in a professional capacity. 
• Startup background — experience operating in an early-stage, resource-constrained environment, building processes, tools, or programs from scratch.

How You'll Be Assessed In the First 90 Days

By Day 30:
Deliver a written risk assessment to the CPO, covering all core responsibility areas: current manufactured-spend exposure, existing Sardine/risk-model rule inventory, sponsor bank reporting cadence, and gaps against the role.
By Day 60:
First draft of the risk policy document delivered, directly addressing the gaps identified in the day-30 risk assessment. Where the day-30 memo diagnosed what's missing, this document is the prescriptive fix — the actual standards and procedures Kasheesh, auditors, and the sponsor bank hold the company to going forward.
By Day 90:
Fraud loss rate and dispute win rate reported to the C-suite for at least one full cycle, with actual numbers. • At least one documented case of catching a risk signal early and acting on it. • At least one chargeback or dispute case taken end-to-end. You will investigate and finalize the determination.