Behavioral Insights Lead - Identity

It all started with an idea at Block in 2013. Initially built to take the pain out of peer-to-peer payments, Cash App has gone from a simple product with a single purpose to a dynamic ecosystem, developing unique financial products, including Afterpay/Clearpay, to provide a better way to send, spend, invest, borrow and save to our 50+ million monthly active customers. We want to redefine the world’s relationship with money to make it more relatable, instantly available, and universally accessible.

Today, Cash App has thousands of employees working globally across office and remote locations, with a culture geared toward innovation, collaboration and impact. We’ve been a distributed team since day one, and many of our roles can be done remotely from the countries where Cash App operates. No matter the location, we tailor our experience to ensure our employees are creative, productive, and happy.

The Role

As a Behavioral Insights Lead - Identity, you will lead a core function in our specialized Behavioral Insights Team (BIT), you will guide a team to gather, assess, explore and scrutinize patterns, data and signals to identify and mitigate high-risk / fraudulent activity across our platform. We need an experienced leader to support and drive our investigations and analytics effort that is the core of BIT. The team is responsible for the most complex processes, pattern recognition and analytical work in the Health (Risk/Fraud) organization.

As the Behavioral Insights Lead - Identity, you will leverage your deep fraud and risk understanding skills to drive efficiency and effectiveness. You will partner every day with the BIT (Risk/Fraud) Analysts and Data Science teams to build better Machine Learning (ML) models and protect customers and the Cash platform, brand and reputation. You will also partner with many organizations across the business, like Product, Engineering, Finance, Compliance and Operations to understand potential areas of abuse or fraudulent behaviors and investigate them.

In this role, you will drive innovation and influence Cash App’s global risk roadmap, programs, and processes. Simultaneously, you will lead, coach, mentor and develop team members to define and achieve high performance bars individually and collectively, and foster their professional development and enable them to contribute more and more to our business.

The ideal candidate possesses strong leadership experience leading a team of high performing analysts, a proven mastery of broad effective communication with cross-functional partners and strong problem-solving capabilities. This role requires a bias toward taking action in a fast-paced environment and deep experience with risk and fraud vectors with a specific focus across identity related functions, including customer onboarding processes, Know Your Customer (KYC), account access and login controls, and other key financial services functions.

Our ideal candidate also understands the role of ML models and their continued validation and improvement in managing risk at scale and has worked with Data Science teams in the past. Prior experience managing a team of high performing individuals in a fast-paced environment is required.

You Will

• Lead and develop a team of 5-10 individuals


• Be a mentor to your team - share experience and best practices developed through your experience


• Ensure the investigations framework to support frequent model iteration and validation efforts and communicate feedback to cross-functional business partners is maintained and up to date


• Partner with HR, Talent, and Recruiting on sourcing candidates as well as administration of HR Policies/Procedures


• Provide performance management, ongoing feedback, and professional coaching


• Assist with professional development and upstream, preventative, future-proof thinking


• Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, speed, innovation, excellence, and a fun work environment while continuously elevating the quality and caliber of our controls


• Recognize and Reward Talent; ensure accountability at all levels within the team roles


• Assist in building and executing on short-term and long-term plans with associated benefits of strategies that are developed to reduce financial exposure associated with identified high-risk activity


• Showcase strong time-management skills to maintain or exceed expected daily workloads, lead the team by example.


• Be a voice of the customer by identifying trends, issues, and suggesting improvements to processes, policies, and products including recommending tooling and data improvements to increase investigations efficacy


• Provide suggestions and insights to improvement investigation approaches and development of fraud detection systems to identify emerging inauthentic activity trends and provide recommendations to assist in loss mitigation


• Collaborate on and escalate complex cases and new trends within the team, backed by industry knowledge of common financial services fraud vectors and risk controls

You Have

• 4+ years of prior leadership experience managing a team of high performing fraud analysts, including coaching and development


• 2+ years of experience working within financial services, technology, or fintech preferred


• Flexibility to lead individuals in different time zones and work with teams in multiple time zones


• Demonstrated depth of knowledge in the realm of customer identity and onboarding, specifically experience with KYC, CIP, FinCrimes, and access controls


• Demonstrate flexibility to adapt and able to manage multiple assignments


• Show strong ability to conceptualize, develop, and implement process improvements around investigatory workflows and approaches


• Previous experience working with machine learning models and modelers


• Experience with utilizing visualizations (e.g. Tableau, Looker, Mode) either directly or through leading a team responsible for such visualizations


• Experience using statistical approaches to solving business problems


• Ability to prepare and present findings to multiple levels within the leadership hierarchy


• The ability to answer unstructured business questions and work independently to drive projects and analytical tasks to conclusion


• Excellent problem-solving skills, including root cause analysis / identification

Even Better

• Bachelor's degree in related field (management, mathematics, statistics)


• CFE (Certified Fraud Examiner), ACAMS (Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist), or similar accreditation


• Familiarity with SQL or with leading a team versed in SQL

We’re working to build a more inclusive economy where our customers have equal access to opportunity, and we strive to live by these same values in building our workplace. Block is an equal opportunity employer evaluating all employees and job applicants without regard to identity or any legally protected class. We will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and “fair chance” ordinances.

We believe in being fair, and are committed to an inclusive interview experience, including providing reasonable accommodations to disabled applicants throughout the recruitment process. We encourage applicants to share any needed accommodations with their recruiter, who will treat these requests as confidentially as possible. Want to learn more about what we’re doing to build a workplace that is fair and square? Check out our I+D page.

While there is no specific deadline to apply for this role, U.S. roles are typically open for an average of 55 days before being filled by a successful candidate. Please refer to the date listed at the top of this job page for when this role was first posted.