Head of Fraud
Polymarket · New York City · $500,000 (stated in the posting)
About the role
Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market, and trust in every account, deposit and trade is core to the product. As Head of Fraud, you will own Polymarket's fraud risk end to end: defining the strategy, building preventative and detective controls, and making sure every finding is resolved.
Your scope covers first-party fraud (customers abusing the platform themselves) and third-party fraud (bad actors targeting our users and systems, including account takeover). You will hold the bar for what good looks like both commercially and in the eyes of our regulators, and you will move fast.
You will partner with and influence Product owners and engineers you don't manage build and ship most fraud controls, so influencing them is critical to success in this role. You'll also work closely with Compliance, Legal, Data, Payments, Customer Support and Security.
What you'll own
Strategy and risk ownership
Own the fraud risk framework and appetite, and set the roadmap to deliver it.
Maintain a living fraud risk assessment and typology library across onboarding, funding, trading and withdrawals.
Report fraud exposure, losses, control performance and emerging threats to senior leadership and governance forums.
Preventative and detective controls
Partner with Product and Engineering to assess fraud risk before new products, payment methods, promotions, and material feature changes launch.
Define and implement controls that stop fraud before it happens: identity and device signals, step-up authentication, velocity and limit rules, and payment and withdrawal checks.
Build detective controls that surface fraud fast: monitoring rules, ML and AI models, anomaly detection, alerting and case management.
Tune controls continuously against loss rates, false positives and customer friction.
Fraud types in scope
First-party fraud: chargeback and friendly fraud, promotion and referral abuse, ACH fraud, multi-accounting, and identity misrepresentation by genuine customers.
Third-party fraud: account takeover, synthetic and stolen identities, stolen payment methods, phishing, social engineering, scams, and organized fraud rings.
Findings and resolution
Own investigations, from triage to root cause to closure.
Make sure every finding from monitoring, audits, regulatory exams and incidents has an owner, a fix and a deadline, and is closed out.
Feed lessons back into product, controls and policy so issues don't recur.
Team and partnership
Build and lead a high-performing fraud team of analysts, investigators and fraud data specialists.
Drive delivery through Product and Engineering: shape their roadmaps, win prioritization for fraud work, and design prevention into features from day one.
Work with Compliance and Legal on regulatory expectations, SAR-related escalations and exam readiness.
Select and manage fraud vendors and tooling.
What we're looking for
Influence is the most critical skill for this role, and we'll assess it at every interview stage.
Exceptional influence. You have a track record of getting fraud controls shipped by product and engineering teams you don't manage. You build trust fast, make a clear case using data, win prioritization against competing roadmaps, and turn disagreement into decisions.
Deep fraud expertise. 10+ years of experience in fraud within fintech, payments, banking, crypto, trading, online gaming, or other high-volume digital platforms, including at least five years in leadership, with direct accountability for fraud prevention, investigations, operations, and measurable outcomes.
Control design that works. A track record of building preventative and detective controls from scratch and proving they cut losses without hurting good customers.
Breadth across fraud types. Hands-on experience with both first-party and third-party fraud, including account takeover, identity fraud and payment fraud.
AI native. You use AI and automation as your default way of working: for detection models, investigation tooling, case triage and your own day-to-day productivity. You know where models beat rules and where they don't.
Commercial judgement. You understand that the goal is the right balance of loss, friction and growth, not zero fraud. You can put a number on the trade-offs.
Regulatory lens. You know what regulators expect from a fraud program (governance, documentation, testing, escalation) and can defend our approach in an exam.
Pace and ownership. You drive outcomes quickly, prioritize ruthlessly and close things out. You're comfortable in a fast-moving, high-growth environment.
Data fluency. Comfortable working directly in SQL and with data teams to size problems and measure control performance.
Nice to have
Experience at a regulated exchange, derivatives venue or broker, or at a crypto platform with on-chain and fiat flows.
Familiarity with blockchain analytics and wallet-level risk signals.
Exposure to market abuse and trade surveillance, and how it intersects with fraud.
Experience building fraud capability across multiple jurisdictions.
Hands-on experience shipping LLM or agent-based tooling for investigations.
Benefits
- Competitive salary & equity
- Unlimited PTO
- Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage
- 401k match
- Hardware setup: new MacBook Pro, big display, & accessories
Pay Transparency
Base salary range: $500,000 to $6000,000, plus equity and benefits.
This is a good-faith range for the level we're hiring at. Experience varies widely within a title here, so if your expectations fall outside it, reach out anyway. We're always happy to talk it through.