Director – Fraud and Merchant Risk Operations

About Toast:

Toast is driven by building a platform that helps our customers adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love.

Position Overview:

Our Fraud & Merchant Risk Operations team is the frontline that protects our merchants and our platform. This team handles the full lifecycle across Fraud, Merchant Risk, and Merchant Compliance—from pre-onboarding to transaction monitoring, product-abuse prevention, account access and ATO response, chargebacks/representment, reserves/holds, and offboarding.

We’re seeking a strategic, execution-minded Director of Operations to lead this function end-to-end across Toast’s entire product suite—including Payments, Embedded Finance, and Payroll. You’ll design the operating model and SLAs, scale the team and tooling, run incident response, and deliver measurable reductions in loss and friction. You’ll partner closely with Product, Fraud Strategy, Legal, and Compliance, while providing a rigorous feedback loop to sharpen controls and enable confident growth.

About this roll* (Responsibilities)

Operations Strategy & Operating Model

• Own the end-to-end operating model for Fraud, Merchant Risk, and Merchant Compliance across the merchant lifecycle (prospect loans, pre-onboarding/KYB, transaction monitoring, product-abuse prevention, account access/ATO, chargebacks/representment, reserves/holds, and offboarding).
  
  
• Define policies, SOPs, SLAs, and escalation pathways; maintain an auditable control environment with strong QA and knowledge management.
  
  
• Set and track operational KPIs (fraud rate, chargeback ratio, approval rate, manual review rate, false-positive rate, SLA adherence, fraud losses).
• Lead cross-functional war rooms during fraud waves and high-severity events; conduct postmortems and implement preventive hardening.
  
  

Pooled Workforce & Capacity Management

• Lead a multi-level analyst pool supporting all Toast products; implement workforce management (capacity models, scheduling, adherence) across diverse queues and time zones.
  
  
• Drive the development of training and QA programs; drive productivity and quality improvements through coaching, calibration, and playbook refinement.
  
  

Lifecycle Coverage & Queue Operations (All Product Lines)

• Onboarding: Operate onboarding controls including KYB/KYC verification, business model and MCC validation, document collection and EDD workflows, bank-account ownership/verification, and exception handling.
• Payments: Manage card-present and card-not-present fraud queues, dispute operations, merchant settlement risk, and network program adherence.
  
  
• Embedded Finance: Oversee ACH risk, debit and credit card programs, Capital disbursements, returns and unauthorized claims, account linking and verification, disbursement controls, and limits management.
  
  
• Payroll: Lead controls for employer/employee identity, payroll-diversion and direct-deposit changes, and impersonation attempts.
  
  
• Minimize customer friction while meeting SLAs; ensure effective escalations and remediation.
  
  

Tooling, Data & Automation

• Translate operational needs into requirements for case management, rule engines, alerting, link/graph analysis, and data enrichment.
  
  
• Prioritize and validate tooling enhancements; evaluate third-party vendors in collaboration with Strategy (identity/KYB/KYC, device/behavioral intelligence, bank-account verification, consortium data) and drive ROI via clear success criteria.
  
  

• Operationalize policies, rules, and models; provide ground-truth feedback on efficacy, friction, and emerging patterns across each product line.
  
  
• Run structured experiments with Product/Data Science; define success metrics, execute controlled rollouts, and lead post-launch reviews.
  
  

Executive Communication & Stakeholder Management

• Deliver clear, data-driven readouts on risk posture, incidents, operational performance, and capacity needs to executive leadership.
  
  

Example KPIs you’ll own/influence: Fraud/chargeback rates; ATO; review SLA adherence; approval/conversion and false-positive rate; representment win rate; fraud loss; analyst productivity

Do you have the right ingredients*? (Requirements)

• 10+ years in fraud/trust & safety, merchant risk, payments, or related operations at a PayFac/PSP, acquirer, fintech, or marketplace, with a record of reducing loss while improving customer experience.
  
  
• 5+ years leading managers and multi-disciplinary operations teams; proven in org design, workforce management, QA, and training at scale (including 24/7 coverage).
  
  
• Breadth across multiple product domains—payments (CP & CNP), embedded finance/money movement (ACH/RTP/push-to-card), lending/working-capital, and payroll; ability to tailor controls to each risk surface.
  
  
• Strong command of merchant compliance and partner requirements, including card-network monitoring programs and dispute frameworks.
  
  
• Track record implementing tooling and automation (case management, rule engines, device/behavioral intelligence, bank-account verification, data enrichment) and managing vendor ecosystems with measurable ROI.
  
  
• Analytical fluency (dashboards, SQL is a bonus), with comfort instrumenting KPIs, capacity models, and control-effectiveness metrics; evidence-based decision-making under pressure.
  
  
• Exceptional cross-functional influence with Product, Data Science, Legal, and Compliance; adept at translating operational insights into policy and tooling changes.

Why join us?

Own the operating backbone that keeps restaurants safe and thriving—across every way customers move money and get paid with Toast. You’ll design systems and teams that reduce loss, speed decisions, and keep experiences fast and friendly—at Toast scale.

AI at Toast

At Toast we’re Hungry to Build and Learn. We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality. We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired by how our Toasters are already driving real value with them. The people who thrive here are those who embrace changes that let us build more for our customers; it’s a core part of our culture.

Our Spread* of Total Rewards
We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry. Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits.

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