--- title: 'Head of Risk at Modern Treasury' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-risk-modern-treasury-san-francisco-k8d79gr851cy' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-12' --- # Head of Risk at Modern Treasury - **Company:** Modern Treasury - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $200k–$285k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-08-21 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/moderntreasury/6aea2452-d858-434b-acc9-e9785c21cb69 ## Job description ## OVERVIEW Modern Treasury is hiring a Head of Risk to build our risk function from the ground up. Money moves through Modern Treasury for some of the largest and fastest-growing companies in the economy. How well we manage the risk in that movement directly shapes the product — who we can onboard, how fast they can transact, and how much friction they feel along the way. This is a foundational, hands-on role. You will decide how customers are underwritten, how limits and reserves are set, how transactions are authorized, and how we detect fraud — and you will build those systems early, before scale forces the decisions for you. This role reports to our General Counsel, who leads Legal, Compliance, and Risk. ## ABOUT MODERN TREASURY Modern Treasury provides trusted infrastructure for money movement. The company helps teams launch and scale payment experiences in days, not months. With best-in-class developer tools and a single API for fiat and stablecoins, plus built-in compliance, ledgering, and reporting, Modern Treasury enables businesses to move money instantly, reliably, and at scale. ## ABOUT THE ROLE You will start as an individual contributor with the mandate to build. You will own: - Onboarding & underwriting: How we evaluate customers before they move money with us — what we need to know to say yes, what conditions we attach, and how to reach that decision fast enough that it isn't the reason a customer picks someone else. You will partner with Compliance on KYB while owning the underwriting judgment beside it. - Transaction risk & limits: How we authorize money movement in real time, and how limits flex as we learn more about a business. This includes the hard cases — managing dynamic limits when a few customers drive most of the volume, and loosening constraints on good customers as fast as the data allows. - Reserves & exposure: Reserve policy and our view of loss exposure across ACH returns, unauthorized debits, and counterparty failure. You will quantify what we're exposed to, decide what's worth taking, and make that reasoning legible to the rest of the company. - Detection & the risk engine: The machinery. You will select and deploy the tooling — vendor, in-house, or both — that turns policy into automated decisions, and use modern AI tooling to automate case handling rather than staffing your way out of the problem. - New rails, stablecoins & wallet controls: The emerging surface area. You will help Modern Treasury expand into stablecoins, wallets, RfP, and local rails in other countries safely — understanding the risks unique to each rail, partnering with Product on controls that are both safe and usable, and designing for new money-movement patterns before they become edge cases at scale. You will work across Engineering, Product, Compliance, Finance, and our customer-facing teams, and make sure risk and compliance run on one coherent set of systems rather than two stacks that disagree. ## WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR - You've built this before: You've stood up a risk function at an early-stage or high-growth company rather than inherited a mature one. You know what the first version looks like, what to defer, and what will hurt in eighteen months if you skip it now. - Payments risk, specifically: Not lending or credit. You understand ACH returns, settlement timing, unauthorized debit exposure, and counterparty risk. You know the difference between risk and compliance, and where they have to work as one. - Curiosity about new rails: Stablecoin, wallet, RfP, or international local-rail experience is a strong plus. More importantly, you are interested in learning unfamiliar rails quickly and translating their unique risks into practical product and operational controls. - A systems thinker, not a queue operator: You think about decisioning at scale and design for an order of magnitude more volume. You'll set thresholds and review edge cases by hand when needed, but you're building toward something that doesn't require it. - Technical and data fluency: You can go deep with engineers and hold your own. You're comfortable in the data yourself — SQL, ideally Python — and fluent in applying modern AI tools to operational problems. - Scar tissue, earned well: You've seen things go wrong — a fraud ring, a loss event, a control that failed in a way nobody anticipated — and carry the pattern recognition that comes with it. You were in the room, not the cause. - Judgment you can defend: You'll make consequential calls with incomplete information and get some wrong. You reason clearly about tradeoffs, write your thinking down, and can explain why a decision was right even when the outcome wasn't. - Influence across the company: You'll often be telling people something they don't want to hear. You can make the case for risk investment in terms the rest of the business cares about. - Management experience is a plus: You may hire onto this team within the first year. You don't need to have run a large org, but you should have managed before and want to build a team over time. Modern Treasury is committed to equal employment opportunity and does not discriminate in any employment opportunities or practices based on an individual's race, color, creed, gender (including gender identity and gender expression), religion (all aspects of religious beliefs, observance or practice, including religious dress or grooming practices), marital status, registered domestic partner status, age, national origin or ancestry (including language use restrictions and possession of a driver’s license issued under California Vehicle Code section 12801.9), natural hair, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, medical condition (including cancer or a record or history of cancer, and genetic characteristics), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding or related medical condition), genetic information, sexual orientation, military and veteran status or any other consideration made unlawful by federal, state, or local laws. It also prohibits unlawful discrimination based on the perception that anyone has any of those characteristics, or is associated with a person who has or is perceived as having any of those characteristics. Modern Treasury participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S. ## About Modern Treasury ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Modern Treasury provides a single API and unified ledger for fiat and stablecoin payment infrastructure, enabling companies to launch and scale money movement products rapidly. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series C; total funding $183M) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA (with an additional office in New York, NY and presence in Spain) - **Founded**: 2018 - **Founders**: Matt Marcus (CEO) and Dimitri Dadiomov (President & Co-Founder) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Financial technology (payments infrastructure, banking-as-a-service) - **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises, financial institutions, fintechs, marketplaces, payroll platforms, and any business that moves money at scale. - **Mission or purpose statement**: “To be the most trusted infrastructure for global money movement” and to help money move “at the speed of the internet” by bridging fiat and stablecoin rails. ## Products & Services - **Payment Operations API**: A single RESTful API that abstracts ACH, FedNow, wire, and stablecoin rails, enabling companies to send and receive money, manage accounts, and reconcile in real time. - **Programmable Accounts**: Virtual account creation and management with a real-time ledger for tracking balances, deposits, and transfers. - **Stablecoin Orchestration**: On‑ and off‑ramp stablecoin transactions (e.g., USDC) alongside traditional fiat rails, with built‑in compliance. - **Wallet Infrastructure**: Digital wallet support for holding and moving both fiat and stablecoins under one ledger. - **B2B Invoicing & Cross‑Border Payments**: Unified payments for invoicing, global USD accounts, and multi‑currency collections/payouts. - **Embedded Solutions for Marketplaces, Payroll, Lending, Card Issuing & Rewards**: Pre‑built modules that let platforms embed payment capabilities without rebuilding back‑end infrastructure. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed. - **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$183M** (across Pre‑Seed, Seed, Series A, and two Series C rounds). The company reports having processed **over $600 billion in payments** (website) – though LinkedIn cites “over $400 billion” (likely an earlier figure). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Benchmark (led Series A), Altimeter Capital (led Series C), Salesforce Ventures, and several other institutional investors. Acqui‑hire of Beam. - **Growth Signals**: - Launched stablecoin orchestration and global USD accounts, indicating expansion into crypto‑native and cross‑border use cases. - Active job postings: **17 open roles** as of mid‑2026, with monthly postings up 21.4% and yearly postings up 325% – suggesting renewed headcount growth after a significant reduction (headcount dropped 39.6% YoY to ~98 employees). - Multiple industry‑focused solutions (payroll, lending, card issuing) signal product‑led expansion. ## Competitive Advantages - **Dual‑rail platform**: Unlike competitors that focus solely on fiat (e.g., Plaid, Finicity) or solely on crypto (e.g., Circle), Modern Treasury unifies fiat and stablecoin rails in a single API with a real‑time ledger. - **Proven scale**: Over $600B in payments processed, used by “hundreds of organizations” including leading enterprises and financial institutions. - **Compliance built‑in**: Automated compliance workflows for both fiat and stablecoin transactions reduce regulatory burden for clients. - **Developer experience**: “One API, go live in days, not months” with best‑in‑class developer tools and documentation. - **Uptime guarantee**: 99.99% uptime for core platform. ## Strategic Focus - **Stablecoin leadership**: Betting heavily on stablecoin regulatory clarity to become the default infrastructure for companies that want to offer both fiat and crypto payments. - **Global expansion**: Enabling cross‑border payments and USD accounts for international businesses, reducing reliance on correspondent banking. - **Platform depth**: Adding vertical‑specific modules (payroll, lending, card issuing) to move up‑stack and increase wallet share with existing customers. - **Go‑to‑market efficiency**: After a period of contraction (headcount down ~40% YoY), the company is re‑hiring selectively, focusing on engineering, security, and customer success roles. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Described as “principled operators solving some of the hardest problems in money movement.” The team values “trust, curiosity, and constructive feedback” and moves fast while thinking deeply. - **Remote/Hybrid/Office**: Offices in San Francisco (77 Geary St.) and New York (184 Fifth Ave.). The presence of at least one employee in Spain suggests some remote flexibility, but the majority of roles appear to be US‑based with an expectation of in‑office presence in SF or NYC. - **Notable perks**: - Unlimited PTO - Comprehensive healthcare (HMO, PPO, dental, vision) - 16 weeks paid parental leave - Family planning resources (Carrot) - Home office stipend & books/learning stipend - 401(k) through Fidelity - Charitable donation matching - **Engineering culture**: Strong developer tooling focus; the engineering team (43 people) works on ledgering, APIs, security, and stablecoin infrastructure. Recent job openings include multiple Software Engineer (Security) and Infrastructure roles, indicating investment in reliability and trust. - **Rating**: 3.5/5 on employer rating (42 reviews) – with highest marks for Work‑Life Balance (4.2) and Culture (4.0), lowest for Career Development (3.3). The recent VP of People departure (Feb 2026) may signal organizational change. ## Sources 1. [moderntreasury.com](https://www.moderntreasury.com/) 2. [moderntreasury.com/about](https://www.moderntreasury.com/about) 3. [LinkedIn – Modern Treasury](https://www.linkedin.com/company/modern-treasury) 4. [moderntreasury.com/solutions](https://www.moderntreasury.com/solutions) 5. 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