Principal Risk Operations Analyst

Paddle offers SaaS companies a completely different approach to their payments infrastructure. Instead of assembling and maintaining a complex stack of payments-related apps and services, we’re a Merchant of Record for our customers. That means we take away 100% of the pain of payments fragmentation. It’s faster, safer, cheaper, and, above all, way better.

We’re backed by investors including KKR, FTV Capital, Kindred, Notion, and 83North and serve over 3000 software sellers in 245 territories globally.

The Role:

We’re looking for a Principal Risk Operations Analyst to join our Operations team. The Operations team is cross-functional by nature, it’s our job to enable Paddle’s diverse internal functions with insights, processes and tools to make them more efficient and support our rapid growth.

The core of your role will be to build processes, implement tools and iterate on existing processes across Risk, including making data accessible and easy to understand so that we can make informed decisions. You’ll also have plenty of opportunities to refine our data, seek out new sources and implement solutions to enhance the insights we’re able to gain from our analysis. You’ll also work on projects from conception to delivery, ensuring Paddle is able to scale effectively.

What you'll do:

• Collaborate closely with the Risk, Compliance and Legal teams at Paddle to implement and optimise processes, enhance the risk tech stack, and improve decision-making with faster, data-driven insights.

• Act as a player-coach in Paddle’s Risk Operations team — delivering yourself while also guiding analysts, setting priorities and raising execution quality.

• Design and implement innovative tools and solutions that improves fraud detection, policy enforcement, chargeback reduction/prevention and agent productivity — ensuring we move from reactive fix work toward proactive, scalable improvements.

• Identify and address operational inefficiencies, facilitating cross-functional improvements to streamline and enhance risk processes.

• Drive evaluation, selection and rollout of new risk / fraud technologies and ensure they’re operationalised effectively.

• Analyse complex transactional / behavioural data to extract meaningful patterns — define the right metrics, build dashboards, monitor loss drivers etc.

• Raise the bar on how we learn — facilitating continuous improvement, experimentation and measurement — ensuring that Risk ops keeps pace with Paddle’s scale and commercial ambitions.

We’d love to hear from you if you have:

• 5+ years in Operations with experience acting as a senior individual contributor or subject-matter expert within a risk or fraud function.

• Experience acting as a senior analytical voice within small teams, providing technical leadership, mentoring and quality-raising support.

• Highly analytical — obsessive about separating signal from noise, making threshold trade-offs explicit and backing decisions with data.

• Expert in SQL (MySQL or similar) — you can model data, challenge assumptions and debug ambiguous patterns quickly.

• Comfortable with at least one scripting language (Python or JS) or are familiar with workflow tools such as n8n or Retool.

• Understand how Risk sits within a SaaS / payments company, and how risk trade-offs tie directly into revenue, conversion, margin and cost of risk.

• Proactive — you don’t just spot issues, you frame them, size them, prioritise them and move teams toward resolution.

• Excellent communicator — able to translate complex data into business decisions and coach analysts to do the same.

• Competent project lead — run initiatives from problem framing through delivery and measurable impact.

• Curious, automation-oriented, and comfortable iterating live systems safely.

Nice to haves

• 2+ years supporting the growth of ICs through coaching, training, or skill-building in a risk or operations environment.

• Experience with PSPs / processors / gateways (Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, FastSpring, Cleverbridge etc) in a risk context (fraud control, chargebacks, wallets, subscription payments).

• Familiarity with high-scale SaaS Risk orgs and how they interface with Growth, Product and Go-To-Market.

• Familiar with dbt for analytics engineering / data modelling.

• Familiar with AWS (or similar) for lightweight internal tooling / automation / data capture.

• Experience integrating / configuring risk tooling (Monitoring, KYC/KYB, enrichment APIs, chargeback vendors etc).

• You have an interest/knowledge of AI, and how to utilise AI within processes.

• Experience building analytical frameworks or risk models that influence product or operational decisions.

• Background working in small, high-autonomy teams where senior ICs contribute both strategy and execution.

Everyone is welcome at Paddle

At Paddle, we’re committed to removing invisible barriers, both for our customers and within our own teams. We recognise and celebrate that every Paddler is unique and we welcome every individual perspective. As an inclusive employer we don’t care if, or where, you studied, what you look like or where you’re from. We’re more interested in your craft, curiosity, passion for learning and what you’ll add to our culture. We encourage you to apply even if you don’t match every part of the job ad, especially if you’re part of an underrepresented group.

Please let us know if there’s anything we can do to better support you through the application process and in the workplace. We will do everything we can to support any accommodations needed. We’re committed to building a diverse team where everyone feels safe to be their authentic self. Let’s grow together.

Why you’ll love working at Paddle

We are a diverse, growing group of Paddlers across the globe who pride ourselves on our transparent, collaborative and respectful culture.

We live and breathe our values, which are:

Paddle Together

Paddle Simply

Paddle for Others

We offer a full suite of benefits, including attractive salaries, stock options, retirement plans, private healthcare and wellbeing initiatives.

We are a ‘digital-first’ company, which means you can work remotely, from one of our stylish hubs, or even a bit of both! We offer all team members unlimited holidays and 4 months paid family leave regardless of gender. We invest in learning and will help you with your personal development via constant exposure to new challenges, an annual learning fund, and regular internal and external training.