Director, Merchant Risk & Onboarding

Director, Merchant Risk & Onboarding New York

Legal & Compliance

In office

Full-time

What is Bilt? Bilt is the membership for where you live.

What started as a way to reward people on their largest expense has turned into an ecosystem connecting our members, property managers and local merchants. Travel, dining, fitness, everyday spend. We are building systems across payments, credit, loyalty, and commerce all at once.

We run lean and move quickly. Every person here has a real impact on what gets built and how fast it happens.

This role comes with real ownership and high expectations. If you prefer clearly defined lanes and structure, this will feel uncomfortable. If you want to build quickly, have a real say in what gets built, and work on products used by millions, you will likely do your best work here.

What’s the role? Bilt is building a payment facilitator business, which means we carry the merchant risk a processor would otherwise carry for us. Every restaurant, property management partner and retailer we sign is a decision about identity, ownership, business legitimacy and credit exposure. As our Director, Merchant Risk & Onboarding, you will own that decision end to end: the onboarding flow, KYB and beneficial owner KYC, underwriting, the vendor stack, policy and reporting. Our v1 onboarding flow will be live when you join. Your job is to make it fast and seamless for legitimate merchants, keep bad actors out, and make sure it holds up under sponsor bank, card network and regulatory review as we scale to thousands of merchants.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role. As the program grows and the need is clear, there may be room to add to the team down the line. You will spend most of your week designing and improving onboarding flows with Product and Engineering, and you will also review applications and transactions yourself and handle the edge cases. You will work closely with Legal, Compliance, Local Merchants, Payments, Fraud and Data Science, and with our sponsor bank and processing partners.

In this role, you will own…

Own the end-to-end merchant onboarding flow for restaurants, property management partners and retailers, from application to first processed transaction, balancing conversion against risk.

Partner with Product and Engineering to refine and extend the v1 flow, automating approval for low-risk applications and routing the rest to a clear manual review path.

Run KYB: entity validity, registration and good standing, EIN match, address, MCC and business model validation, website and menu review, and licensing such as liquor licenses where relevant.

Lead beneficial owner and control person KYC under the CDD rule (the federal rule on verifying business owners): ownership thresholds, document and selfie checks, sanctions, PEP and adverse media screening, plus enhanced due diligence for complex ownership, shell entities and nominee owners.

Review applications and merchant transactions yourself, work the hardest cases, and write the manual review playbook and turnaround standards.

Build the underwriting framework for each vertical: expected volume and ticket size, chargeback exposure, deposit and delayed-delivery risk, reserves, rolling holds, limits, and triggers for monitoring and re-underwriting.

Select, configure and tune orchestration, KYB and fraud vendors against measured false positives, false negatives and cost.

Partner with Fraud and Data Science on merchant fraud patterns such as bust-out, transaction laundering, collusive merchants and application fraud rings.

Write and maintain policy and procedures that satisfy our sponsor bank, Visa and Mastercard payment facilitator rules and BSA/AML obligations, working with Compliance and Legal on CIP, risk assessments and exam readiness.

Report on funnel and portfolio health — approval rate, time to approve, manual review rate, early-life loss and chargebacks — to executive leadership and to bank and network partners.

In terms of qualifications, we’re seeking:

7+ years in merchant onboarding, merchant risk, underwriting or KYB/KYC at a payment facilitator, acquirer, processor, merchant-facing fintech or sponsor bank.

A track record of building onboarding or merchant risk programs hands-on, ideally at a high-volume SMB payfac (Square or Toast style) or a smaller company where you built it yourself.

Hands-on experience running KYB and beneficial owner verification at scale, with working knowledge of the FinCEN CDD rule, CIP requirements and BSA/AML fundamentals.

Experience underwriting small and mid-sized merchants, with real exposure to chargebacks, reserves and merchant losses.

Working knowledge of card network registration and monitoring requirements for payment facilitators and their sub-merchants, and direct experience working with sponsor banks.

Experience with orchestration tools (e.g. Alloy, Taktile, Footprint, Oscilar), KYB vendors (e.g. Middesk, Baselayer, LexisNexis) and identity and fraud vendors (e.g. SentiLink, Socure, Ekata), including contract, configuration and performance tuning.

Fluency in SQL and portfolio analytics: you can pull your own cohorts, read approval and loss curves, and design rules and thresholds with analysts and data scientists.

Clear writing, sound judgment, and a strong preference for building things yourself.

Nice to Have:

Background in restaurant, POS, property management or retail merchant onboarding, including multi-location and franchise structures.

Experience taking a payfac program through initial sponsor bank and network approval.

Experience with fraud decision engines such as Sardine or SEON.

Experience with processors such as Adyen, Stripe, Checkout.com or Fiserv.

Familiarity with merchant transaction monitoring and transaction laundering detection.

Experience with ML-based or rules-based application risk scoring.

Benefits:

Compensation - We offer a competitive salary with a meaningful stake in the company via equity and our performance bonus program.

Medical Insurance (for you and your loved one) - We offer a variety of different subsidized medical plans (with dental and vision), including a free HDHP with a company-sponsored HSA contribution. We have you covered from Day 1.

Wellness Benefits - Enjoy a One Medical Membership, Wellhub (Gympass) Access, family planning programs and more, on us.

401k plan with a match - Retirement may feel more like a pipe dream than a reality but we’re here to help you get there.

Commuter FSAs - We believe the best ideas come from being together in one place. We just don’t think getting there should be so expensive.

UNLIMITED PTO - Because we believe that working hard shouldn’t mean always working. Take time for yourself as often as you need it.

Exclusive Employee only Bilt Points - We give our employees unique opportunities to earn points throughout their time at Bilt.

Team Events - We believe in human connection so