Fraud and Abuse Operations Analyst

Responsibilities

• Safeguard Plaid's Platform: Participate in the abuse on-call rotation, directly protecting our users and customers by responding to and resolving fraud and abuse events. Your timely actions will be instrumental in maintaining trust and security.
• Drive Investigations and Mitigate Risks: Investigate fraud and abuse claims from diverse sources, partnering with senior teammates on complex cases. Your findings will inform decisions and strategies, directly impacting Plaid's ability to prevent future incidents and minimize financial losses. Proactively perform threat modeling of abuse surfaces and continuously survey external fraud trends, adversary techniques, tooling, and emerging threat vectors
• Support Incident Response: Help triage and manage fraud and abuse events as internal incidents (SEVs), collaborating across teams to drive resolution. Your contributions in these situations will minimize disruption and protect Plaid's reputation.
• Inform Product Strategy: Partner with Consumer Risk and other product teams, providing operational insights from on-call and investigations. Your contributions will help inform the development of effective fraud mitigation solutions and strengthen Plaid's defenses.

Qualifications

3+ years of experience in fraud/abuse operations, trust & safety, and/or incident response

• Incident response and investigations:
• Experience triaging fraud or related incidents, with tight containment deadlines.
• Experience managing escalations and making informed trade-off decisions with multiple stakeholders.
• Ability to coordinate and communicate effectively with internal Legal, Compliance, Comms and other risk management teams during incident triage.
• A battle-tested mental model for balancing fraud mitigation vs. conversion, and the ability to calibrate and apply this mental model in the context of Plaid’s business objectives under pressure.
• Fraud and abuse detection and prevention context:
• Working knowledge of fraud typologies–account takeover, different types of payments fraud, ACH fraud, chargebacks, kiting, rewards harvesting, etc.
• Familiarity with the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by bad actors to commit different types of fraud on the web.
• Familiarity with common mitigation strategies for the same, with a developing point of view on their relative pros and cons.
• Fraud and abuse intelligence:
• Dark and grey-web navigation and investigation experience, ability to assess source credibility, and translate external intelligence into actionable insights.
• Experience translating fraud investigations and research into actionable detection signals, rules, and labeled datasets, while partnering closely with DS/ML and product teams to improve feature sets, labeling quality, evaluation frameworks, and model decay monitoring.
• Experience developing and maintaining threat models for authentication and other high-risk product surfaces, with a track record of proactively identifying emerging risks.
• Data analysis skills:
• Proficiency with SQL for querying data sets and building reports.
• Comfortable with common analysis tools and manipulation tools.
• Ability to spot anomalies and fraudulent patterns in logs and other data sets (transactions, request data, etc.), with judgment to escalate ambiguous cases.
• Operational depth and maturity:
• Experience contributing improvements to operational processes and controls.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Nice-to-Haves

• Familiarity with machine learning models for fraud detection.
• Fraud domain certifications (e.g., CFE/fraud examination background).
• Exposure to production ML model lifecycles and metrics for drift/decay.
• Effective use of AI and AI agents to accelerate investigations and research

Our mission at Plaid is to unlock financial freedom for everyone. To support that mission, we seek to build a diverse team of driven individuals who care deeply about making the financial ecosystem more equitable. We recognize that strong qualifications can come from both prior work experiences and lived experiences. We encourage you to apply to a role even if your experience doesn't fully match the job description. We are always looking for team members that will bring something unique to Plaid!

Plaid is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, ethnicity, religion or religious belief, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, military or veteran status, disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Plaid is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance with your application or interviews due to a disability, please let us know at accommodations@plaid.com.

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Additional compensation in the form(s) of equity and/or commission are dependent on the position offered. Plaid provides a comprehensive benefit plan, including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k). Pay is based on factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience and skillset, and location. Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefit plans.