Risk Manager

Outpost Global commerce is a regulatory minefield. Without proper risk management, you're one compliance breach away from losing market access, banking partners, or customer trust. Outpost needs someone to own this. We operate as Merchant of Record across 58+ tax jurisdictions, handling payments, tax compliance, and customer experience for digital and physical goods. That means we sit at the intersection of payments, regulatory compliance, financial crime, and operational risk - across dozens of regulatory regimes simultaneously. This is the first risk hire. You'll build the risk function from scratch.

The Role

This is a Risk Manager role for someone who wants to build like a founder, thinks like a regulator, and operates like an operator. You'll own risk management end-to-end - from identifying emerging regulatory requirements to designing controls, embedding them in products, and ensuring we can scale safely across new markets. You'll work directly with the CEO, engineering, product, operations, and tax to turn complex regulatory frameworks into practical, scalable risk management. This isn't a role where you write policies and file them away. You'll be in the weeds: reviewing product launches, debugging compliance gaps with engineers, working with banking partners, analysing transaction data, and making hard trade-offs between speed and safety. You care deeply about building things the right way. You want to enable growth, not block it.

What You'll Get

Yes, the work is intense. But in return, you'll get training and exposure most people wait 10–20 years to access. You'll be working on global problems, dealing with regulators and banking partners, and owning strategic risk decisions across payments, tax, financial crime, and operations - from day one. We won't handhold, but we'll coach you hard. If you're hungry, you'll leave this role with a world-class risk skillset and the ability to scale fintech products in the hardest markets.

What You'll Do

• Own the risk function: Build Outpost's risk management framework from scratch (policies, procedures, controls, and governance).
• Identify, assess, document, and monitor risks across payments, tax, financial crime, and operations.
• Set risk appetite and tolerance levels in partnership with the CEO and founding team.
• Make the hard calls: what's acceptable risk vs. what could kill the business.
• Enable safe growth: Work with Product and Engineering to embed risk thinking into new product launches and market expansions.
• Conduct pre-launch risk assessments for new products, markets, and banking partnerships.
• Design practical, effective controls that protect the business without slowing it down.
• Ensure we can say "yes" to merchants safely (not just say "no" to risk).
• Be the regulatory expert: Stay ahead of regulatory changes across payments, MoR, tax, and financial crime in key markets (EU, UK, US, etc.).
• Translate complex regulatory requirements into clear, actionable guidance for product and operations teams.
• Represent Outpost in discussions with regulators, banking partners, and payment processors.
• Build relationships with external stakeholders and maintain regulatory credibility.
• Manage financial crime and operational risk: Design and implement AML/fraud controls across 58+ jurisdictions.
• Monitor transaction patterns, investigate suspicious activity, and manage incident response.
• Own the control environment for payments, settlements, and treasury operations.
• Work with Operations to identify and remediate operational risk gaps.
• Build the infrastructure: Develop KRIs (Key Risk Indicators) and MI (Management Information) to track risk exposure in real-time.
• Implement risk incident management processes - logging, investigating, and remediating issues.
• Create training and enablement materials so the whole team understands their risk responsibilities.
• Build scalable systems and processes that grow with the business.

Example Projects

• Conduct risk assessment for launching in 5 new EU markets and design the compliance playbook.
• Improve our AML transaction monitoring rules to catch real fraud without creating false positive nightmare.
• Work with Engineering to build automated controls for payment routing and settlement risk.
• Analyse six months of payment data to identify the top 10 risk drivers and build mitigation strategies.
• Create a quantitative risk scoring model for new market launches based on regulatory complexity, fraud rates, and operational readiness.
• Build automated KRI dashboards that alert on risk threshold breaches.
• Build a data pipeline that aggregates risk signals from payments, tax, and operations into a unified view.

What We're Looking For

• Ideal background: 5-7 years in risk, compliance, or financial crime at a payments company or fintech (Stripe, Adyen, Revolut, Wise, Checkout.com, or similar).
• Strong quantitative background - degree in STEM, economics, or similar (or demonstrable data science skills).
• Payments/fintech experience is mandatory - you need to understand how money moves and where risk lives.
• Proficiency in SQL and at least one programming language (Python, R) for data analysis.
• Experience in 1LoD (first line of defence) - you've owned risk, not just overseen it.
• Bonus: MoR, marketplace, or cross-border payments experience.
• Bonus: worked in a regulated environment with direct regulator or banking partner interaction.
• Bonus: Experience building risk models, monitoring systems, or fraud detection algorithms.
• Bonus: machine learning or statistical modelling experience applied to risk/fraud.

Signals we care about:

• Data-driven decision making - you use statistical analysis and modelling, not just intuition.
• Technical fluency - you can write SQL queries, build dashboards, and work with engineers on data pipelines.
• Quantitative rigour - you understand statistical significance, false positive rates, and model performance metrics.
• Pragmatic risk mindset - you enable growth safely, not block it bureaucratically.
• Regulatory fluency - you can read complex regulations and translate them into practical action.
• Bias for action - you build controls and frameworks, not just write policies.
• Comfortable in chaos - you thrive when building from scratch in ambiguous environments.
• Commercial awareness - you understand the business model and make risk decisions that balance safety and growth.
• Strong communicator - you can explain risk to engineers, merchants, and regulators equally well.

What this role is not:

• Not a pure 2LoD oversight role (you need to build and own, not just review).
• Not someone who needs a team or established processes to be effective.
• Not a specialist who only wants to work on one risk domain (AML, fraud, etc.).
• Not someone who sees risk as "saying no" (your job is to enable safe growth).

Why This Role Is Different

This isn't about managing an existing risk function. It's about building the risk infrastructure that powers global commerce from the ground up. You won't just be in the room, you'll be defining how we manage risk. You'll have exposure to every part of the business: payments, tax, compliance, treasury, operations. You'll work directly with the founding team. You'll shape the controls that let us scale safely into new markets. The problems are hard. The scope is massive. The impact is real. We expect whoever is in this role to grow rapidly, and we'll back you every step of the way.

Outpost Team

Our team were leaders at Revolut, Airwallex, Adyen and Wayflyer - and we're backed by top-tier investors who have built or backed some of the world's leading fintechs.

What We Offer

• Equity and salary in a well-funded startup.
• Ability to own your work and move fast.
• World-class training from operators who've scaled globally.
• A global mission with real impact.
• Low politics, high output.
• Chance to grow into Head of Risk as we scale.
• A culture of builders, not box-tickers.

Working Style

We work together in person in London or Amsterdam, 4-5 days a week. We believe the hardest problems are solved in the room.

Reach Out

emile@outpost.ai

Outpost is where the hard problems are. If you want to build the risk function that enables global trade, we'd love to hear from you.