Risk Operations

About Column

For companies building financial technology and transforming the financial services space, the biggest bottleneck to their growth and innovation is often the underlying banks and infrastructure stack they rely on. We have spent our careers founding and scaling companies like Plaid, Square, Meta, Blend, and Affirm, and have seen this problem firsthand — builders and developers needing to partner with traditional banks, and creating API and abstraction layers over the patchwork that is the bank, its core, and many other vendors. All of this results in a complex (and often expensive) banking supply chain involving a user, fintech, BaaS middleware provider, bank, core and the Federal Reserve.

At Column, we set out to simplify and fix this. We are a bank and a software company built from the ground up, offering builders and developers technology-forward banking solutions that cut out the hundreds of vendors, middleware providers, and abstraction layers. This means a safer, more transparent, and less costly banking supply chain. Come build with us!

The opportunity

Many banks treat Risk as a cost center - Column treats it as a competitive advantage. Our ability to take on new customers, expand into new product areas, and successfully operate under regulatory scrutiny depends entirely on the quality of our Risk programs. As we grow, the volume and complexity of that work will outpace what the team can absorb - that’s where this role comes in.

This is a strategic operations role that lives inside our Risk function. It’s less about being a Risk expert and more about being an exceptional operator who is energized by learning new domains quickly, spotting inefficiencies, and building the tools to fix them. You’ll work closely with a variety of teams across Column (e.g., Engineering, People, Compliance, Legal, etc.) to figure out which processes and programs are slowing us down. By the time you’re done with a project, tasks that took days should take minutes, and you’ll have a deep understanding of what it takes to operate one of the most strategically important functions to our business.

This role reports to the Head of Technology Risk and is in-person based out of our San Francisco Presidio office 3-4 days a week.

What you’ll do

• Plug into whichever Risk program needs the most support at a given moment - third-party risk management, information security, model risk, privacy, financial, operational, etc. - and figure out what’s broken, slow, or missing.

• Learn each program from the ground up - understand what it’s actually protecting against, how it works in practice, and where the gaps are. Then re-design it so it’s faster and more consistent.

• Build the tooling that makes the next version of a process possible - scripts, internal dashboards, AI-assisted review workflows, system integrations.

• Support third-party diligence and monitoring, helping assess vendor/supplier risk and turning your findings into concrete remediation steps.

• Help design business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) exercises that test how Column and its partners actually respond when things go wrong.

• Take our privacy program to the next level, and make sure privacy considerations are part of the way we diligence prospective customers from the start.

What you’ll need to be successful

• 2+ years of doing something hard. This could be in consulting, technical operations, software engineering, or any role where you had to make sense of a complex system, improve it, and get others to adopt the change. Prior risk experience is not required - we’ll teach you the domain.

• You get up to speed fast. You’re the person who can be handed an unfamiliar problem, spend a week understanding it, and come back with a point of view.

• You have an optimization instinct. When you see a manual process, your first question is "could this be automated?" and you have the skills to actually build the tooling necessary to make that happen. You've automated meaningful pieces of your own job before.

• Technical fluency is no problem for you. You’re comfortable in the terminal, writing or modifying Python, Go, Apps Script code. Querying databases with SQL, working with APIs, and reasoning about systems is familiar territory. You can speak the same language as our engineering team and ask thoughtful questions to help yourself understand our environment.

• Written communication is a strong suit. You can take a vague alert, messy vendor review, or unclear audit finding and turn it into a well-articulated response memo, policy update, or control narrative that holds up under scrutiny from auditors and regulators.

• Your projects are hyper-organized. You’re comfortable juggling multiple concurrent workstreams across stakeholders with varying priorities, surfacing tradeoffs early, getting people to commit to a shared goal, and knowing when something needs to be escalated vs. decided in the moment.

What you'll get from us

• 🏥 Comprehensive health, dental, and vision plans, including options that are 100% covered by Column for you and 50% covered for your dependents

• 💳 FSA and HSA account options to enable use of pre-tax money for medical and dependent care expenses

• 📈 401k plan, including self-directed brokerage options

• 🌴 Flexible time-off policy - take the time off that you want and need to relax and recharge

• 👶 100% paid parental leave, including 16 weeks for birth mothers, 12 weeks for primary caregivers, and 8 weeks for secondary caregivers

• 🍽️ Catered lunches and dinners for SF employees

• 🚆 Commuter benefits

• 🎉 Regular team building events, including annual offsite

Pay transparency:

The annual US base salary range for this role is $125,000 - $150,000, exclusive of equity compensation and benefits.

This salary range may span several career levels at Column, and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors including, but not limited to, the candidate’s skill sets, experience, licensure and certifications, location, and other business and organizational needs.

We look forward to hearing from you

Column is committed to working with the best and brightest people from the broadest talent pool possible. We value bringing together a team with different perspectives, educational backgrounds, and life experiences, and believe a diversity of ideas is what allows us to develop the best solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation during the application and recruiting process, please reach out to [email protected].

We participate in the E-Verify program in certain locations as required by law. Learn more about the E-Verify program here.