Senior Risk Analyst

About Highnote

Founded in 2020 by a team of leaders from Braintree, PayPal, and Lending Club, Highnote is the unified platform for embedded finance, built for modern issuing, acquiring, credit, ledger, and real-time money movement. With an integrated ledger, full program management, and a purpose-built architecture, we help companies design financial products around their customers and launch faster with greater control.

We’ve raised $145M+ and have grown our team to 140+ employees across 25+ US States, with headquarters in San Francisco. Along the way, we’ve built one of the most experienced payments teams in the industry.

We’re fast-moving and hands-on, and we believe everyone deserves a seat at the table. Our values of customer obsession, executional excellence, intentional inclusion, guide how we build the payment products of tomorrow's business needs. We’re looking for people who want to help shape the future of payments.

Job Description

Highnote is looking for a Senior Risk Analyst to join our risk operations team with a focus on transaction monitoring. This is an opportunity to bring your experience and tool kit to an early stage company, where you will work with compliance, product, engineering, and our sponsor bank partners to build and scale how we detect, investigate, and act on suspicious activity across our card issuing platform.

Ideal candidates have worked in ambiguous environments and filled a variety of roles. They also know the USA PATRIOT Act, BSA/AML and OFAC requirements, fraud typologies, and the regulatory expectations for monitoring at banks, card issuers, or similar institutions.

What you’ll need to be wildly successful:

• Focus on quality while maintaining high-quantity output. This role requires someone who can work alert queues efficiently while keeping the accuracy that risk decisions demand. You have a solid base of transaction monitoring knowledge in fintech or banking, and to say “you learn quickly” is a gross understatement.
• Maintain a strong and healthy sense of curiosity. You want to understand the root cause behind every alert, challenge explanations, and validate what the data is telling you. You look past the single transaction to the pattern behind it, and you know your findings can have serious implications.
• Empathy for customers and an ability to glean insights from customer communication and behaviors. You balance customer experience with risk and regulatory requirements. You can explain the why behind a decision clearly without disclosing confidential details, and you can quickly tell genuine activity from potentially suspicious behavior.
• Ability to assess the big picture with a refined detail-oriented approach. You can spot an emerging trend across a portfolio while still working an individual case to closure, and you can turn what you see in investigations into better rules and controls.
• Advocate for the teams you work with and service. Risk and compliance can sometimes appear at odds with growth goals. You can show the value of strong monitoring and help partners understand how it protects the business.
• Self-awareness is key. You know your strengths and your blind spots, and you position yourself to make the most of the first and shore up the second.

What you’ll be doing:

• Review, investigate, and disposition transaction monitoring alerts for fraud, AML, and sanctions risk within established timelines and quality standards.
• Conduct in-depth investigations of unusual or suspicious activity, including account, card, and counterparty analysis, and document findings with clear rationale and supporting evidence.
• Identify patterns and typologies such as structuring, rapid movement of funds, card testing, account takeover, money mule activity, and misuse of programs by undisclosed third parties.
• Prepare accurate, well-supported referrals for Unusual Activity Reporting, and support UAR narrative quality and timely filing.
• Analyze transaction data to identify emerging fraud and compliance trends across subscribers and programs, and recommend risk-mitigating actions such as card or account restrictions.
• Partner on the design, tuning, and backtesting of monitoring rules and scenarios, using alert outcomes to reduce false positives and close coverage gaps.
• Monitor subscriber program activity against expected behavior and escalate deviations that may indicate elevated risk.
• Support sponsor bank oversight, regulatory exams, and audits by producing monitoring data, case files, and responses to inquiries.
• Contribute to monitoring procedures, alert-handling playbooks, and quality assurance so the team’s processes scale as the platform grows.
• Support KYC/KYB reviews of new subscriber applications as needed during periods of high volume.
• Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation (one week per month) to respond to real-time risk events such as fraud spikes, card-testing/BIN attacks, and high-risk transaction alerts, escalating and coordinating with Operations and Engineering as needed.

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience on a risk or financial crimes team with a focus on transaction monitoring, BSA/AML investigations, fraud investigations, and suspicious activity reporting
• Demonstrated knowledge of regulatory obligations for payment and/or card issuing platforms
• Experience working in risk at a Bank or other financial institution
• Hands-on experience with transaction monitoring systems, including alert review and rule or scenario tuning
• Successful under pressure and with shortened deadlines
• Demonstrated success developing inventive solutions to complex problems
• Comfortable using AI tools to speed up investigations, research, and documentation, while applying sound judgment to verify the results

Bonus Qualifications:

• CAMS, CFE, and/or CFCS certification
• SQL and BigQuery experience, especially for building ad hoc analyses or backtesting rules
• Experience with card network data and typologies (e.g., authorization, clearing, chargebacks)
• Experience presenting to and collaborating with executive teams and sponsor banks

Why Highnote?

• Build from the ground up. As an early-stage company, we give every employee the chance to shape what we build and how we operate, with impact across the whole organization.
• Payments-obsessed, from every background. Some of us come from fintech and some of us don’t. We value the range of experience and perspective each person brings.
• Small on hierarchy, big on growth. We’re a flat organization, so everyone works directly with our leadership team. We’re looking for builders who thrive in ambiguity.
• Backed by top investors. Our investors include Oak HC/FT, Costanoa Ventures, Adams Street Partners, Westcap, and Pinegrove Venture Partners. Our angel investors include Bill Ready (CEO of Pinterest) and Renaud Laplanche (Co-Founder and CEO of Upgrade).

Highnote benefits

• Equity in Highnote
• Flexible paid time off
• Health coverage: 100% covered for employees and 75% for dependents
• 401(k) program
• Paid parental leave
• Remote work support: a home office stipend, plus internet and phone reimbursement

Compensation

Our total rewards approach is built on fair, equitable, location-based pay that reflects both performance and potential. We set our packages using thorough market research, and they combine base salary, equity, and benefits. In line with pay transparency requirements, the annual salary range for this role is $90,000-$130,000.

Work Location

Roles based in San Francisco are hybrid, and we’re in the office Monday through Thursday. We offer flexible arrangements depending on how far you live from our downtown SF office. We believe in the power of face-to-face connection, so we give priority to candidates who can work from the office.

Equal Opportunity

Highnote is committed to building a diverse and inclusive team, and we welcome applicants of all backgrounds and identities. We do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by US federal, state, or local law, or by the laws of the country or jurisdiction where you work. We also invite you to share the pronouns you’d like us to use (e.g., she/her, he/him, they/them).

A Note on Recruitment Fraud

Highnote will never ask you for payment or bank details, and we never conduct interviews over text or chat apps. All official communication comes from an @highnote.com email address or through Greenhouse.