Senior Director, Risk

Want to help us help others? We’re hiring!

Go Fund Me  is the world’s most powerful community for good, dedicated to helping people help each other. By uniting individuals and nonprofits in one place, Go Fund Me  makes it easy and safe for people to ask for help and support causes—for themselves and each other. Together, our community has raised more than $40 billion since 2010.

Join us! The Go Fund Me  team is searching for our next Senior Director, Payments Risk with deep payments, fintech, and regulatory experience to lead and scale our compliance, CDD/EDD, and risk monitoring capabilities. This person will be responsible for driving strategy, partnering closely with executives, and navigating complex, high-stakes decisions, while ensuring the team feels supported, informed, and empowered.

This is a role for someone who thrives in high intensity environments, embraces scrappiness, and brings courage of conviction, clarity of communication, and a collaborative spirit. There is a significant opportunity to transform the function, improve efficiency, strengthen controls, elevate Go Fund Me ’s global payments infrastructure, and further our mission to Help People Help Each Other.

Trust is at the core of Go Fund Me ’s business. It drives our growth, shapes our brand, and ensures we always do the right thing for our donors, organizers, and beneficiaries. As we continue to evolve as a payments platform, the Payments Risk organization sits at the frontline of protecting our global community against fraud, financial crime, and abuse.

Strategic Leadership & Risk Governance

• Serve as a senior leader for payments risk and compliance, acting as an expert advisor to the company and the Board on regulatory obligations, processing requirements, and financial crime risk.
• Establish and continuously evolve frameworks for CDD, EDD, KYC/KYB, transaction monitoring, and suspicious activity management.
• Lead Go Fund Me ’s evolution toward greater control of our own payments, collaborating deeply with multiple internal and external teams.
• Apply a payments‑centric mindset across Go Fund Me , grounding the organization in the importance of having strong payment infrastructure.
• Ensure compliance with AML, sanctions, card network rules, and relevant U.S. and international standards.

Operational Excellence & Loss Prevention

• Oversee and coach teams responsible for analyzing fundraisers for fraud or money‑laundering risks, verifying identities, enforcing financial compliance, and monitoring transactions.
• Improve, track, and communicate loss reporting, ensuring root‑cause analysis and implementation of compensating controls.
• Guide the design and refinement of workflows across donation review, account review, dispute prevention, and merchant/payer fraud mitigation to reduce chargeback rates and losses.
• Lead risk reviews, assessing financial exposure and creditworthiness.
• Oversee recovery of negative balances and mitigations around potential or actualized losses.

Cross‑Functional Collaboration & Communication

• Serve as a trusted partner to executives, product leaders, finance partners, engineering, comms/public affairs, and legal stakeholders.
• Translate complex payments and regulatory requirements into clear, accessible explanations for teams without compliance backgrounds, especially in high‑pressure situations.
• Over‑communicate when necessary, preparing leaders with context and framing to advocate effectively on risk decisions.
• Bring nuance to strict regulatory requirements, recognizing when flexibility or context are needed, but never compromising on compliance.

Team Leadership, Culture & Development

• Lead and scale distributed global payments risk teams (U.S. & Dublin), setting clear goals and expectations while nurturing an environment of psychological safety, resilience, and mutual support.
• Act as a visible advocate for the team, ensuring they feel supported, defended, and positioned for success.
• Create and deliver training on compliance obligations, payments risk, and best practices to a wide range of stakeholders.
• Foster curiosity, empathy, and cross‑functional understanding by embedding yourself in team workflows and modeling our…