Fraud Risk Mgr/Dir

Fraud Risk Manager/Director @ Nelo

Location: NYC or Mexico City, 80% in office

Language: English required, Spanish strongly preferred

Role mission: To prevent catastrophic fraud attacks while minimizing the impact to good customers

Role outcomes

What must get done; the reasons we opened this role.

• Fraud threat assessment: Within three weeks of start date, produce a comprehensive “independent” fraud risk assessment of Nelo. Where are our biggest weaknesses, what is on fire or a greater risk than we previously believed? What is your proposed roadmap based on these findings?

• Acquisition fraud: Within six weeks of start date, launch an experiment that successfully reduces first payment default rate by a specified amount with the smallest possible impact to approval rate.

• Cap any currently uncapped fraud risk: Within four months of start date, the risk of an unmitigated, especially programmatic fraud attack (acquisition or transaction) should be credibly reduced to a negligible amount due to controls you have put in place. This is the #1 outcome the person who fills this role needs to accomplish. Of course this status decays moments after it is achieved, but we should still strive for it.

• Professionalize fraud ops function: Within seven months of start date, develop a system that generates repeatable intelligence and decisions from a manual fraud case review feedback loop, likely with a combination of human and AI agents.

YoE and role scope note: There is no general years of experience requirement. However, in order to possess the competencies below and to work within the posted comp range, we’d expect successful candidates to have around 6-12 total years of experience. Also, this is a senior IC role. Scale your impact through code and agents first; people leadership opportunities will be unlocked for high performers when there are specific outcomes that are clearly best achieved by hiring people. In a business growing like ours, your ability to push yourself and be effective will be your biggest constraint on impact, not resources.

Role-specific competencies

The skills you will need to accomplish the role outcomes

• Background: Must have either (1) at least two years of experience in LATAM-based consumer lending fraud mitigation, or (2) be able to fluently speak Spanish. Of course having both provides you with a strong advantage.

• Autonomy: After becoming familiar with our product and customer base, you have strong opinions about what should be improved, and you autonomously act to achieve those improvements.

• Creative: We no longer live in a world where you can just react to fraud as it comes; with AI-enabled threat actors, the scale and sophistication of attacks is now so high that the need for creative threat mitigation and pre-emption is higher than ever.

• Analytical self-sufficiency: Your analysis should not need to be double checked for technical correctness. Your SQL proficiency is advanced.

• Pragmatic: You may not have the technical infrastructure you want for some time. However, you still need to be an effective fraud manager in the mean time; fraudsters don’t care about your Q4 roadmap.

• Persuasion and communication: You’ll need the ability to persuade team members to accept or do things that they don’t like but that are essential to the company’s health. This will require you to marshal evidence in a convincing way and tell stories with data.

• Paranoia: you are legitimately concerned about new threat vectors and potential fraud losses, you worry about customer experience, etc.

Company culture fit competencies

What makes people successful at Nelo

• Ambitious: You are highly driven to succeed, you are competitive, and perpetually unsatisfied.

• High standards: This is your craft and you sweat the details.

• Work ethic: Nelo isn’t a large established company where the machine is already fully optimized; we are, for example, discovering the correct credit box as we go. This simply requires a lot of work, and if that’s unpalatable to you, that’s ok but this role isn’t for you.

• Proactivity: At Nelo, people that act with ownership and agency are rewarded with more responsibility and compensation.

• Efficiency: We prefer to move fast and learn fast, which requires efficiency.

• Honesty and integrity: We are dealing with people’s financial lives. We have to be able to trust you.

Why I joined Nelo

A personal note from the hiring manager

For some background, Nelo is building a modern alternative to a credit card, designed from first principles for a world of real-time and mobile payments. Our mission is to increase the buying power of consumers in Latin America.

I joined this company for two reasons:

• The founders: Kyle and Stephen are world class operators that brought the experimentation culture from Uber and applied it to a lending business in Mexico. The result after years of compounding is incredible; it must be near the top of its vintage (2019) for lending fintechs. The founders are kind, honest, hard-driving, paranoid (about risk!), pragmatic, intelligent, very hard working, and never satisfied.

• Unit economic and product-market fit: You cannot reach a ~$70mm annualized revenue run rate, and be profitable on a net basis without the unit economics being solid, and without customers actually liking the product.

Nelo has also raised from some of the best investors, including Homebrew and Two Sigma Ventures. We also have all the debt capital we need, and from reputable lenders. We have an ambitious, senior, and technical team with a performance culture. This isn’t financial advice, but I’ll be honest, I’m excited about the value of my equity. Come build with the team and I!

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary: NYC: $165-215K, CDMX: COL-adjusted

• Competitive equity

• 100% medical, dental & vision insurance coverage for you, 50% for dependents

• 401(k) for US-based employees

• Extended maternity and paternity leave

• Unlimited PTO (though most of us take about 3-4 weeks/yr)

• Relocation support