# Fraud Intelligence Lead

**Company:** [Plaid](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/plaid)
**Location:** New York, NY
**Role:** Security Engineering
**Salary:** $149k – $233k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Fraud Investigation, Incident Response, Threat Modeling, SQL, Python, BI Tools, Anomaly Detection, Graph Analysis, Network Analysis, Rule Engines, Machine Learning, Model Monitoring, Payments, Identity Verification, Dark-Web Investigation
**Posted:** 2026-08-18

> Leads a high-leverage fraud intelligence team while personally investigating complex attacks across identities, devices, accounts, and payments. The role combines people leadership, incident response, threat intelligence, and partnerships with product and ML teams to improve fraud detection and prevention.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities

### Team Building & People Leadership
- Set the casework quality bar by defining rigorous investigation, triage, and reporting standards.
- Coach analysts on investigation techniques, pattern synthesis, and translating findings into product and model inputs.

### Operating Model & Cross-PA Partnership
- Own coverage allocation across Protect/IDV and Payments/ACH pods, flexing assignments as volume shifts.
- Manage matrixed staffing and time allocation between the Fraud PA and Payments PA.
- Represent Fraud Intelligence in product and model roadmap discussions, translating casework patterns into strategic priorities.

### Reporting & Escalation
- Report team health, casework trends, and emerging risks to the Head of Fraud.
- Own escalation paths for SEVs and incidents requiring legal, law-enforcement, or regulatory involvement.

### Live Fraud Investigation & Reconstruction
- Lead investigations into complex fraud cases across identities, accounts, devices, and transaction surfaces.
- Support day-to-day fraud operations, including SEVs and alert triage.
- Reconstruct attacker sequences and hypothesize actor intent and tooling.
- Distill patterns from noisy signals into clear narratives and actionable insights.
- Bridge investigation outcomes to product and model improvements.

### Product & Model Partnership
- Collaborate with Data Science, ML/AI, and Product teams to improve labeling, feature sets, evaluation frameworks, and model decay monitoring.
- Surface data-quality limitations and formalize missing features.
- Translate exploratory research into reusable feature pipelines, model inputs, or rule augmentations.
- Participate in product discovery, roadmap planning, and post-launch evaluation to ensure fraud awareness by design.

### Ecosystem Monitoring & Knowledge Leadership
- Monitor external fraud trends, adversary techniques, tooling, and emerging threat vectors.
- Perform threat modeling of abuse surfaces and initiate research proposals when patterns emerge.

## Requirements

- 5+ years of applied fraud experience in a high-velocity environment such as fintech, consumer payments, banking, SaaS, marketplace risk, or security research.
- Investigator mindset, including pattern synthesis, hypothesis testing, and skilled triage between signal and noise.
- End-to-end investigation experience reconstructing attacker intent and behavior in multi-step attack sequences across accounts, devices, and identities.
- Post-containment incident response experience with emphasis on post-mortems and root-cause analysis.
- Dark- and grey-web navigation and investigation experience, including assessing source credibility and translating external intelligence into actionable insights.
- Strong communication skills for explaining complex, ambiguous behavior to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Fluency with data environments and investigative toolchains, including BI tools, anomaly detection, and case trackers.
- SQL for deep data querying and exploratory analysis.
- Python for scripting, rapid prototyping, and analytical workflows.

## Nice-to-Haves

- Graph or network analysis experience for detecting linked behavioral structures or actor networks.
- Familiarity with rule engines, signal gating, and large-scale monitoring systems.
- Experience applying AI tools and agents to accelerate investigations and research workflows.
- Ability to translate fraud research into actionable signals, rules, or labeled datasets that improve model performance.
- Fraud-domain certification such as CFE.
- Prior work on consumer identity, payments, or risk platform development.
- Exposure to production ML model lifecycles and metrics for drift or decay.
- Experience improving internal fraud tooling, automation, or case-management systems.

## Compensation & Benefits

- Annual salary range: **$148,800–$232,800 USD**.
- Additional compensation may include equity and/or commission, depending on the position offered.
- Comprehensive benefits include medical, dental, vision, and 401(k).

## Similar jobs

- [GRC Lead](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/1b5215fb-00e5-49a2-a7f2-6817a14b255f) - Juicebox - San Francisco, CA - $150k – $250k/yr
- [Security & Trust Lead](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/2c665c46-9fc0-42d0-bc34-777fa50c8e6b) - Alex - San Francisco, CA - $150k – $180k/yr
- [Senior Security Software Engineer, Security Operations](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/3afac001-b1e8-426c-8a65-56ae5e375464) - Pinterest - Remote - $156k – $320k/yr
- [Senior Security Engineer, Incident Response](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/c68462e8-6fd9-48ef-99a9-0516fb5468d8) - Twilio - Remote - $142k – $208k/yr
- [Senior Security Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/bf99bce1-bf10-4938-81d3-d24f8455171f) - Pindrop - Remote - $140k – $165k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/35d29683-b36d-4c65-a143-3bc124a869ab
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/35d29683-b36d-4c65-a143-3bc124a869ab