Director of Engineering - Risk and Compliance Software engineering London

Company Description

We’re Checkout.com. You might not know our name, but companies like eBay, Spotify, Klarna, Uber, and Sony do, because we’re behind many of the digital experiences you use every day. We are where the world checks out, enabling over 10 billion transactions yearly for more than one billion global shoppers. Whether you want to book a holiday, order food, renew a subscription, or check out online, there’s a good chance our tech powers the payments behind the scenes. Our platform helps the most ambitious businesses deliver effortless digital experiences, at scale. If you want to do career-defining work, you’ve come to the right place. We move fast, think globally, and believe great teams are built by hiring exceptional people with conviction, curiosity, and the desire to make an impact. With 20 offices across six continents and London as our HQ, we’re shaping the future of fintech – and we’re just getting started.

Role overview | Context

Checkout.com built its name serving the world's largest enterprises. We're now growing into many more types of customer: businesses of every size, including self-serve, startups integrating straight from our docs, and platforms (software companies, payfacs and marketplaces) that onboard thousands of sellers through our APIs. As our product range grows, that takes us from thousands of customers to millions. At that scale, the decision about who we work with, and on what terms, can't be a manual review at the end of a sales process. It has to be a product. It decides how quickly a good business goes live, how much it costs us to serve them, and how confident our regulators and scheme partners are in us. We're looking for a senior Engineering leader to own that decision.

This team decides which businesses we can work with and on what terms. It covers business verification, screening, underwriting, ongoing monitoring and financial crime. It's a shared platform that serves every one of our businesses. Its users are our customers (directly, or through the platforms they sign up with) and, internally, our Risk, Compliance and Financial Crime teams and the analysts who run reviews and investigations.

Much of what we have today was built segment by segment and market by market, for a smaller number of large customers. The next chapter is one opinionated, configurable decisioning platform. Enterprise, platform and SMB customers should all run on the same foundations, with the right depth of checks and the right terms for each. That way a new product, segment or market doesn't mean rebuilding our controls, and this team isn't on the critical path for every launch.

Role overview | Risk, Verification & Compliance

The remit covers:

• Risk decisioning: underwriting, risk tiering, exposure limits, reserves and settlement terms, and when to restrict or offboard, re-assessed across the customer lifecycle.
• Business verification: company, ownership, document, bank account and website checks, run once for every segment.
• Financial crime: sanctions and PEP screening, AML and transaction monitoring, and the controls, audit trails and reporting behind our regulatory obligations.
• Decisioning platform: the shared infrastructure that runs these checks automatically for every market and customer type.

You'll partner closely with the teams that own onboarding and identity verification.

Role overview | Remit and Responsibilities

You'll be comfortable building and scaling critical platforms in a regulated environment, where correctness, auditability and availability matter as much as speed. You'll balance two goals that are often in tension: making it fast and easy for good businesses to work with us, and keeping bad actors out and the business compliant. This is a change role. You'll assess what we have, set a clear direction, and move us from segment-specific, analyst-led processes to an automated decisioning platform, without pausing the business while you do it. You'll do this in close partnership with Product, Risk, Compliance, Financial Crime and Legal, and with the leaders of the businesses that depend on the platform.

You'll directly lead an established team of engineers and managers of varying seniorities. Amongst other duties, you'll have impact across:

• Setting the technical vision and strategy for Risk, Verification & Compliance. That includes deciding what we build once and share, and what each segment, product or market configures.
• Building a decisioning platform that automates the decisions that don't need a human, safely, and sends the rest to the right analyst with the context they need. Our automation rate sets our cost to onboard and to serve.
• Making risk dynamic across the customer lifecycle. New businesses start on terms that match the signals we see: limits, reserves and settlement speed. Those terms relax automatically as the business trades well, and we act quickly when the signals change. This starts with simple rules and evolves into machine learning.
• Making decisions explainable, so that customers, partners and our own analysts understand why a decision was made and what happens next.
• Giving Risk and Compliance the dials. Acceptance criteria, early-life controls and policy should be configuration that can be changed, tested and measured by cohort, not a code change.
• Keeping our financial crime controls ahead of growth. Screening and monitoring have to scale from large enterprises to a very large base of smaller businesses, through new channels, payment methods and products.
• Leading the design and delivery of verification, screening, underwriting and monitoring systems that are accurate, auditable and highly available.
• Representing Engineering in regulatory, audit, scheme and partner conversations where needed.
• Managing and developing a high-performing team of individual contributor (IC) Engineers and Engineering Managers, providing guidance, support and career development.
• Striving for best practice on hiring, coaching and enablement, and being a magnet for top talent.

Role overview | Desired Background, Core Competencies

The ideal candidate for the role will bring:

• Experience leading multi-level engineering organisations (EMs and ICs) through growth and change, with a track record of developing leaders, not just hiring them.
• A record of transforming critical platforms while the business kept running: multi-year re-architecture, migrations, or consolidating several systems into one.
• Experience building and operating mission-critical decisioning or rules platforms at scale. Ideally these served several customer segments, products or markets from a shared foundation.
• Experience in a regulated environment (financial services, payments or similar), where compliance, auditability and risk are part of the engineering problem.
• Deep technical understanding of cloud-native, distributed and data-heavy systems, including how to run ML models safely in production.
• Exceptional collaboration skills, with a proven ability to partner with senior cross-functional stakeholders, particularly in Risk, Compliance, Financial Crime and Legal, and to make clear trade-offs in a complex stakeholder landscape.
• Ideally, domain knowledge in KYB, AML and financial crime, underwriting, fraud or merchant risk. Experience with self-serve or high-volume onboarding, or with platforms and their sub-merchants, is a strong plus.
• Humility, low ego and an ideal ambassador for our mission, values and operating principles.

If you feel that you don't meet all the requirements but think you might still be right for the role, please consider continuing in the process. We're always keen to build relationships with leaders who resonate with our mission and values.

Additional Information

Bring all of you to work. We create the conditions for high performers to thrive, through real ownership, fewer blockers, and work that makes a difference from day one. Here, you’ll move fast, take on meaningful challenges, and be recognized for the impact you deliver. It’s a place where ambition gets met with opportunity, and where your growth is in your hands. We work as one team, and we back each other to succeed. So whatever your background or identity, if you’re ready to grow and make a difference, you’ll be right at home here.

It’s important we set you up for success and make our process as accessible as possible. So let us know in your application, or tell your recruiter directly, if you need anything to make your experience or working environment more comfortable.

Life at Checkout.com

We understand that work is just one part of your life. Our hybrid working model offers flexibility, with three days per week in the office to support collaboration and connection. Curious about what it’s like to be part of our team? Visit our Careers Page to learn more about our culture, open roles, and what drives us. For a closer look at daily life at Checkout.com, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram.