Head of Risk, Agentic Operations

Pockyt is building the AI-native infrastructure for global money movement. We give merchants a single platform to accept payments from anywhere, send money globally, and manage funds through Global Virtual Accounts and stable coins — but our ambition runs deeper than the rails themselves. We're architecting the connective tissue that lets money move across borders the way information moves across the internet: instantly, intelligently, and autonomously.

We serve a wide spectrum of merchants, from sophisticated enterprise platforms running complex multi-currency operations to the next generation of AI-powered startups, including the one-person unicorns we believe are about to reshape the global economy. Today, that means one integration, one account view, and one place to track everything. Tomorrow, it means a financial layer that AI agents can natively transact on — where money flows are orchestrated, optimized, and reconciled without human bottlenecks.

Our mission is to make global commerce frictionless. We're not building another payments platform. We're building the operating system for how value moves in an agentic, borderless economy.

We're hiring a Head of Risk & Agentic Operations to own the arc from "merchant approved" to "merchant transacting" — and to make every step of it intelligent, instrumented, and increasingly agent-run. This is our first risk leadership hire in NYC and a peer role to our Applied AI engineering lead. Together, the two of you set the operating model for the next phase of Pockyt: a self-improving company where policy is machine-readable, decisions feed back into the system, and every human review trains the next automated one.

This role brings the full arc together under one neck — merchant acceptance, underwriting policy, ongoing merchant monitoring, sponsor-bank risk dialogue, and the operational throughput from approval to first transaction. You'll inherit a senior underwriter on day one, hire two to three more risk and merchant-ops team members over the next twelve months, and own the policy and the throughput end-to-end.

You won't be doing this alone. You'll work directly with our CEO, partner closely with our CCO on the AML-adjacent surfaces of onboarding, and pair tightly with our Applied AI engineering lead on encoding risk policy into rules and rubrics that agents can execute against. Your first priorities will be defining and enforcing the risk appetite at the front of the funnel, designing the SLA system that compresses time from approval to transaction, and standing up the Risk & Agentic Operations dashboard that becomes the executive team's source of truth.

If you've spent your career in merchant risk and have been waiting for the seat where you get to write the policy, build the team, design the dashboard, and be the human counterpart to the agents executing it — this is it.

• Own merchant risk strategy end-to-end: acceptance criteria, underwriting framework, risk appetite by segment, ongoing merchant monitoring policy, sponsor-bank risk dialogue
• Own the merchant operations arc from approval to first transaction: configure, enable, integrate, activate — with segment-level SLAs and a clean dashboard the executive team trusts
• Define and enforce the high-risk pipeline gating: published acceptance criteria, what gets declined at the door, and what gets pushed back to Sales BD with reasons attached
• Translate risk policy into machine-readable rubrics that drive the agents running underwriting, monitoring, and RFI workflows — a defining half of this role and the work that makes this seat distinct from any other risk leadership job in fintech
• Manage and develop the senior underwriter who joins you on day one; hire and ramp two to three more risk and merchant-ops team members as volume scales
• Partner with the CCO on the AML-driven elements inside onboarding (CDD/EDD, sanctions, beneficial ownership) — clean ownership, no co-owned ambiguity
• Partner with our Applied AI engineering lead on agentic underwriting, RFI triage, monitoring alerts, and the eval frameworks that keep agent-assisted decisions safe
• Own sponsor-bank and partner risk reviews —…