Fraud Strategy Specialist - Payment Risk

About Us
At Félix (https://felixpago.com/), we are building the indispensable financial companion for Latinos in the US. We combine an AI-powered, conversational-first interface with real-time financial infrastructure to make cross-border money movement as easy as sending a text. Starting with fast, affordable remittances powered by AI and crypto rails, we are expanding into credit, savings, and wallet services to support the complete immigrant financial journey. Our ambition is to deliver a white-glove financial experience with the simplicity of a conversation to a community the traditional financial system has historically overlooked.
We are a hyper-growth Series C company, backed by over $300 million in funding from top-tier global investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, QED, Castle Island, Switch Ventures, HTwenty, Monashees, General Catalyst Customer Value Fund. This isn't just about the numbers; it's a testament to the trust our investors have in our vision and our team. Additionally, Félix was selected as an “Endeavour Entrepreneur” and was a recipient of the CrossTech Fintech Startups Award.
Joining Félix means you will be part of a team building a legacy, a company that will outlive us all. This is a rare opportunity to apply your skills to a deeply meaningful mission—serving a community that has been underserved for too long because we are obsessed with our customers . We get things done with urgency and focus , driven by extreme ownership over our impact. We collaborate without ego , fostering radical transparency and fierce loyalty so we can grow together. Because we aim for insanely great rather than just good enough, we stay insatiably curious —always experimenting, building the future today, and delivering a product that truly makes our users' lives better.

About the Role

You'll join the Fraud Strategy team at Felix — the team responsible for how we detect, decide on, and prevent fraud across every product, payment rail, and country we operate in. We sit at the intersection of Data Science, Product, Operations, and Risk: we turn fraud signals into decisions, design the controls that stop bad actors, and make sure good customers move through with as little friction as possible. As Felix grows into new rails, new products and new markets across Latin America, our job is to let the business say yes to growth without letting fraud scale alongside it. You'll own fraud performance across cards, ACH, and digital wallets (Apple Pay / Google Pay). Rules are a last resort here, not a first instinct. We want someone who looks for the fix in the product — a 3DS step-up, a hold, a change to the money-movement flow — before ever reaching for a new rule. You'll go deep on the mechanics of how money actually moves and where it breaks — return codes, settlement windows, tokenization, chargeback reason codes — and pair that with hands-on data work to find the vector, size it, and prove your fix worked. This role is critical to protecting millions of Latinos in the United States while keeping the payment experience seamless for good customers.

Responsibilities

- Fraud Performance Ownership: Own fraud performance for our payment instruments and rails. For each material fraud vector, diagnose the root mechanism and design the highest-leverage way to bring it down — biasing toward durable product and action-based controls over rule sprawl.
- Friction Optimization: Use the full toolkit beyond rules: step-up authentication (3DS / SCA), holds, paused payments, dynamic friction, and product/UX changes — applying the right amount of friction to the right customer at the right moment.
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner with Product and Engineering to embed fraud controls into the payment and money-movement experience, rather than bolting rules on top after the fact.
- Instrument & Rail Expertise: Bring deep, instrument-and-rail-specific expertise: card authorization and 3DS/SCA, ACH return codes and NACHA mechanics, settlement timing and the fraud windows it creates, tokenized wallets (Apple/Google Pay), and chargeback reason codes.
- Experimentation & Validation: Design and run experiments (A/B tests) to validate that a control actually reduces the target vector — and quantify its cost to conversion and good-customer experience.
- Deep-Dive Threat Analysis: Conduct deep-dive analyses on payment fraud schemes, organized fraud operations, and emerging threats across rails to uncover risky behaviors and turn them into action.
- Model Feature Engineering: Partner with Data Science to inform payment fraud models — providing domain expertise on vectors and feature engineering (model development not required).
- Stack Orchestration: Author and maintain decisioning logic in our orchestration stack (Sardine / Oscilar) where rules are genuinely the right tool — and retire rules that overlap or underperform.

Requirements

- Education: Bachelor's degree in a quantitative or related field (Math, Economics, CS, Statistics, Data Science) — or equivalent practical experience.
- Fintech Experience: 4–6 years in fraud / payment risk, with demonstrated depth in payment-instrument and rail mechanics (this is the core of the role, not a nice-to-have).
- Authentication Tools: Strong working knowledge of 3DS / step-up authentication and how to deploy it to reduce fraud without over-penalizing good customers.
- Payment Surfaces Mastery: Deep knowledge of payment systems and their fraud surfaces: cards, ACH (return codes, NACHA), wires, settlement timing, tokenized wallets, and chargeback mechanics.
- Product Mindset: Proven ability to reduce fraud through product and action design, not only rule-writing. You think in terms of vectors and levers, not rule counts.
- Advanced Analytics Stack: Advanced SQL and Python, with the ability to work with large datasets and run complex analysis independently.
- Testing Rigor: Experience designing and reading experiments (A/B testing) to measure control effectiveness and conversion trade-offs.
- Machine Learning Concepts: Understanding of machine-learning concepts and their application to fraud detection (development skills not required).
- Tooling & Visualization: Experience with BI tools (Looker, Tableau, or similar).
- Core Competencies: Strong communication skills for both technical and non-technical audiences, advanced English, and a strong analytical curiosity to go deep into the data to find fraudsters.
- These are the applicable requisites, although equivalent competencies in any of the above will also be considered.

What We Offer

- Competitive salary
- Initial stock options grant
- Annual performance bonus
- Health, dental, and vision plans
- Continuous learning opportunities
- Unlimited PTO
- Paid parental leave
- Work model: currently fully remote, with a future transition to a hybrid set up
- Empowering opportunities for growth in a dynamic entrepreneurial environment

Equal Opportunity Employer
At Félix, we are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all qualified employees and applicants without regard to race, religion, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, or disability. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruitment, hiring, placement, promotion, training, compensation, benefits, and termination.
Want to learn more about our privacy practices? Check out our Privacy Policy (https://www.felixpago.com/en/legal) .