Senior Risk Engineer

What do we do? 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 6000 software sellers in 245 territories globally. The Role: We’re looking for a Senior Risk Engineer 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, Cl