Fraud and Abuse Operations Analyst

Plaid Plaid · Fintech · San Francisco, CA · All Departments

Plaid is seeking a Fraud and Abuse Operations Analyst to be the first line of defense against fraud and abuse on their platform. The role involves responding to events, investigating claims, triaging incidents, and partnering with product and engineering teams to improve fraud mitigation strategies. Responsibilities include safeguarding the platform, driving investigations, supporting incident response, and informing product strategy. Qualifications include experience in fraud/abuse operations, incident response, fraud detection, and data analysis, with a focus on SQL. Nice-to-haves include familiarity with ML models for fraud detection and production ML lifecycles.

What you'd actually do

  1. Participate in the abuse on-call rotation, directly protecting our users and customers by responding to and resolving fraud and abuse events.
  2. Investigate fraud and abuse claims from diverse sources, partnering with senior teammates on complex cases.
  3. Help triage and manage fraud and abuse events as internal incidents (SEVs), collaborating across teams to drive resolution.
  4. Partner with Consumer Risk and other product teams, providing operational insights from on-call and investigations.

Skills

Required

  • fraud/abuse operations
  • trust & safety
  • incident response
  • triage
  • escalations management
  • stakeholder management
  • cross-functional communication
  • fraud typologies
  • threat modeling
  • SQL
  • data analysis
  • operational process improvement

Nice to have

  • machine learning models for fraud detection
  • CFE/fraud examination background
  • production ML model lifecycles
  • drift/decay metrics
  • AI and AI agents for investigations

What the JD emphasized

  • 3+ years of experience in fraud/abuse operations, trust & safety, and/or incident response
  • Experience triaging fraud or related incidents, with tight containment deadlines.
  • Experience managing escalations and making informed trade-off decisions with multiple stakeholders.
  • Ability to coordinate and communicate effectively with internal Legal, Compliance, Comms and other risk management teams during incident triage.
  • A battle-tested mental model for balancing fraud mitigation vs. conversion, and the ability to calibrate and apply this mental model in the context of Plaid’s business objectives under pressure.
  • Working knowledge of fraud typologies–account takeover, different types of payments fraud, ACH fraud, chargebacks, kiting, rewards harvesting, etc.
  • Familiarity with the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by bad actors to commit different types of fraud on the web.
  • Familiarity with common mitigation strategies for the same, with a developing point of view on their relative pros and cons.
  • Dark and grey-web navigation and investigation experience, ability to assess source credibility, and translate external intelligence into actionable insights.
  • Experience translating fraud investigations and research into actionable detection signals, rules, and labeled datasets, while partnering closely with DS/ML and product teams to improve feature sets, labeling quality, evaluation frameworks, and model decay monitoring.
  • Experience developing and maintaining threat models for authentication and other high-risk product surfaces, with a track record of proactively identifying emerging risks.
  • Proficiency with SQL for querying data sets and building reports.
  • Comfortable with common analysis tools and manipulation tools.
  • Ability to spot anomalies and fraudulent patterns in logs and other data sets (transactions, request data, etc.), with judgment to escalate ambiguous cases.
  • Experience contributing improvements to operational processes and controls.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills.