Risk Reporting and Innovation Manager

About Lead Bank

Lead is a banking infrastructure platform trusted by the most innovative companies to power complex financial products. We enable fintechs to offer compliant, programmable services like payments, lending, and digital assets at scale. Banking has moved beyond traditional institutions and is now embedded directly into everyday experiences, meaning companies need modern infrastructure that is safe, secure, and operationally sound.

Today, Lead is one of the only API-first, developer-focused partner banks with the financial, regulatory, and legal expertise required to help fintechs succeed. We operate offices in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, and New York City, and an FDIC-insured bank in Kansas City.

Risk Team at Lead

The Risk team helps Lead innovate responsibly by identifying and managing risk across the business. They own oversight of our strategic third-party partners, risk governance across the enterprise, and engagement with our federal and state bank examiners, which is key to maintaining regulatory credibility. Partnering with Product, Program Management, Compliance, Financial Crimes, Legal, and Information Security, they build and maintain the frameworks that allow new products, partners, and technologies to launch safely. Success on the team requires a relentless pursuit of operational excellence, embracing emerging technologies, and pragmatic application of risk and control expertise to both routine and novel problems.

Role Description

We are seeking a dynamic, strategic, and detail-oriented Risk Reporting and Innovation Manager to lead our continued execution of an AI-first strategy for managing data, risk insights and strategic objectives. This role will also manage the continued evolution of our program reporting, including regulatory examination data, strategic project execution and cross-functional OKR progress throughout the year. This role sits at the center of the Risk Program's operating rhythm, owning the governance materials and committee requirements that keep our risk oversight structure running smoothly, consolidating metrics and reporting into a single, consistent source of truth, and translating program priorities into a strategic roadmap that leadership can act on.

As a key leader within the risk organization, you will act as the connective tissue between risk, compliance, and senior leadership, ensuring committees are well-informed, metrics are consistent and trustworthy, and high-visibility initiatives move forward with clear ownership and momentum. This is a highly visible role with direct exposure to senior leadership and risk committees.

In this role you will:

• Own and continuously refine the AI-adoption strategy within Risk, partnering with risk program leaders and cross-functional stakeholders to leverage leading AI best practices, frameworks and design principles to drive continued development and adoption of dashboards, agents and tools.

• Support the ongoing warehousing of key enterprise data leveraged by the risk team, ensuring data is accessed, sanitized and maintained leveraging industry best practices and automation capabilities.

• Develop, maintain, and execute a capacity planning framework across Enterprise Risk teams, with regular updates to Senior Management and oversight committees.

• Apply a data-driven approach to owning centralized and cross-functional OKR tracking and progress reporting, managing change-management requirements through impact analysis and stakeholder coordination across key initiatives.

• Develop program-level KPI reporting including monthly operational overviews for execution-based risk programs.

• Own the sequencing and prioritization of risk program initiatives, ensuring cross-functional projects run on schedule and in the right order relative to dependencies, resourcing, and regulatory priority against available capacity.

• Build risk dashboards to enhance reporting capabilities tied to the Bank’s Fintech partnerships leveraging automation and AI-native capabilities.

• Contribute to the strategic evolution of the risk program by benchmarking against industry trends, peer practices, and emerging regulatory guidance, and translating findings into a prioritized roadmap for program improvement and cross functional collaboration.

• Leverage AI and industry best practices to prepare and deliver governance materials for risk committees, ensuring committee members have accurate, consistent, and timely information ahead of each meeting

• Work cross-functionally with other risk committee stakeholders to enhance the format and content of the information the committees receive.

• Serve as a key connection point between Risk, Compliance, and senior leadership — surfacing issues, aligning priorities, and keeping high-visibility initiatives moving with clear ownership.

• Coordinate cross-functionally with data stakeholders in support of Bank examinations, audits and other risk & compliance projects which require the acquisition and analysis of data

• Perform other duties as assigned
  

Travel: Occasional travel to Kansas City or other key Lead locations (i.e., SF, NY) as needed.

Qualifications:

• Experience: 5+ years of experience in risk management, compliance, or a related governance/reporting function, ideally within banking, fintech, or Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS)

• AI & Automation Proficiency: Proficient using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Glean to improve operational efficiency and decision making.

• Metrics & Reporting Expertise: Track record of building or owning centralized reporting frameworks, KRIs/KPIs, or executive dashboards that consolidate data from multiple stakeholders.

• Data & Analysis: Proficient in SQL and relational databases including experience with BI/visualization tools such as Power BI, Tableau or Looker.

• Strategic Planning: Experience developing or contributing to strategic roadmaps and translating high-level priorities into structured, trackable plans.

• Regulatory Knowledge: Working understanding of banking regulations and supervisory guidance relevant to enterprise risk governance (e.g., OCC, Fed, FDIC guidance).

• Autonomy & Drive: Highly organized, self-motivated, and able to manage multiple concurrent deliverables and deadlines with minimal supervision.

• Communication & Influence: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; comfortable preparing and presenting materials directly to senior leadership and committees.

• Problem Solving: Proven ability to bring structure and clarity to ambiguous or evolving governance and reporting needs.

What we offer:

At Lead, we design our benefits to support company culture and principles, to foster an efficient and inspiring work environment, and to create the conditions for our team to give their best in both work and life

• Competitive compensation, based on experience, geographic location, and role

• Medical, Dental, Vision, Life, 401k Matching, and other wellness benefits, including FSA, HSA and HRA

• Paid parental leave

• Flexible vacation policy, including PTO and paid holidays

• A fun and challenging team environment in a dynamic industry with ample opportunities for career growth

*Lead Bank is proud to have an inclusive culture committed to ensuring equal employment opportunity in all employment decisions regardless of race, color, gender, national origin, religion, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, military status, veteran status or any other legally protected status.

*Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

*Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

*Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

**Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several US geographic markets. Pay is based on a number of factors and may vary depending on geographical market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. These ranges may be modified in the future.

Zone 1: $141,126 - $166,031 (SF/Bay Area, NYC, Seattle)

Zone 2: $121,625 - $143,088 (Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, Denver, Boston, Washington DC, San Diego, Philadelphia, Portland, Sacramento, Miami)

Zone 3: $102,638 - $120,750 (Other US Metros)