Senior Risk Operations Specialist

Senior Risk Operations Specialist at Realtor.com®

Are you a risk operations expert? Are you eager to help scale a high-performing operations team? If you want to pursue your professional goals as you help grow an innovative real estate tech company, this work is for you. Join us as our newest Sr. Risk Operations Specialist and help change the world of real estate, one home at a time.

At Avail by Realtor.com®, we’re creating a Sr. Risk Operations Specialist role as an advanced individual contributor within our payments and trust & safety team. In this critical role, you’ll perform hands-on investigations and support across both payments and trust & safety queues, and lead the quality, coaching, and day-to-day operations of the specialists who support these areas.

You will be the first line of escalation for issues, own the quality bar for the team’s work, and run training and QA programs that keep our operations accurate, safe, compliant, and user-centric. This is not a people manager role: specialists will continue to report directly to the Manager, Payment Operations, who will own performance management, annual reviews, and compensation decisions.

If you’re passionate about protecting users, money movement, and platform integrity, and you’re energized by coaching others and helping scale a high-performing operations team, this role offers the opportunity to deepen your impact.

Top Reasons to Apply:

• You’ll help safeguard the lifeblood of our product: safe, reliable rent payments and a trustworthy marketplace, by raising the bar on quality and consistency across both payments and trust & safety work.
• You’ll be the go-to escalation point for complex payment, fraud, abuse, and trust & safety investigations, shaping how we handle our most challenging scenarios.
• You’ll design and run QA and training programs that directly improve investigation quality, customer experience, and operational reliability across payments and trust & safety queues.
• You’ll partner closely with the Manager, Payment Operations and cross-functional teams to surface trends, inform process improvements, and advocate for better tooling across risk, payments, and trust & safety.
• You’ll be joining a team that cares about people, purpose, and performance.

What You’ll Do:

• Serve as the first line of escalation for complex payment and trust & safety issues raised by specialists, Customer Care, and internal partners, identifying root causes and recommending durable solutions.
• Handle a portfolio of advanced, high-complexity cases yourself, spanning payments and trust & safety, modeling high-quality investigations, documentation, and communication for the rest of the team.
• Make judgment calls on high-risk transactions, fraud and abuse patterns, and edge-case scenarios, while following established policies, playbooks, and monetary thresholds.
• Partner closely with the Payment Operations Manager on daily priorities, workload and queue management across both groups, and the assignment of complex work across the team.
• Act as the day-to-day lead when the Manager, Payment Operations is out, including managing escalations across both domains and coordinating with cross-functional partners on urgent issues.
• Own the quality bar for Payments and Trust & Safety Specialist work by defining and maintaining clear standards for investigations, documentation, SLAs, customer communication, and risk posture.
• Run a regular QA program: conduct recurring QA reviews for payments and trust & safety cases, provide timely and actionable feedback, track quality trends, and share insights with leadership. Design, maintain, and continuously refine QA scorecards and rubrics that are easy for the team to understand and apply across both payments and trust & safety workflows.
• Provide ongoing coaching and skill development through 1:1 coaching sessions, case reviews, shadowing, and debriefs focused on improving investigation quality, documentation, judgment, and customer experience.
• Design and run training for the payments and trust & safety operations team, including structured onboarding for new specialists and refresher training when workflows, tools, policies, or vendor capabilities change.
• Maintain and contribute to process documentation so that payments and trust & safety workflows, standards, and best practices are clear, up-to-date, and easy to reference.
• Collaborate with Customer Care, Product, Engineering, Finance, Compliance, and Legal to clarify edge cases, share patterns, and surface operational pain points and failure modes observed in both payments and trust & safety queues.
• Document and communicate trends across cases—including fraud and abuse patterns, operational bottlenecks, policy gray areas, and user experience friction—so that they can inform product, policy, and tooling improvements.

Note: You will not own formal performance management (ratings, compensation, or final annual reviews). Instead, you’ll provide structured input and artifacts (QA results, coaching notes, examples of work) that the Manager, Payment Operations uses in their performance management process.

What You’ll Bring: 

• 5+ years of experience in payments, fraud, financial services, trust & safety operations, content/account review, back office operations and/or KYC, with a strong track record of high-quality investigations and sound judgment in risk-sensitive situations.
• Demonstrated excellence investigating and resolving complex issues across payments and trust & safety, including identifying root causes and proposing pragmatic, durable solutions.
• Proven ability to coach and influence peers without formal people management authority, including giving clear, direct, and constructive feedback that helps others improve.
• Strong instincts for quality and detail, with a consistent focus on accurate investigations, thorough documentation, and thoughtful customer communication.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal. You’re comfortable explaining payment flows, trust & safety risks, decisions, and tradeoffs to specialists and cross-functional stakeholders.
• A data- and pattern-driven mindset. You pay attention to trends in returns, disputes, abuse signals, policy violations, failure modes, and fraud patterns, and use those insights to inform your recommendations.
• Experience collaborating effectively with cross-functional partners (for example, Product, Engineering, Finance, Compliance, Legal, and Customer Care).
• Hands-on experience with tools and vendors commonly used in payments, fraud, and trust & safety operations (for example, Stripe, Plaid, Cognito, Proof, credit bureaus, NACHA rails, or similar risk and moderation platforms) is a plus.
• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent experience in a related field (e.g., payments, risk, operations, fraud, trust & safety) preferred.

How We Work:

We balance creativity and innovation on a foundation of in-person collaboration. For most roles, our employees work three or more days in our offices, where they have the opportunity to collaborate in-person, adding richness to our culture and knitting us closer together. This is a hybrid role based in our Scottsdale office 3 times per week. 

How We Reward You:

Realtor.com is committed to investing in the health and wellbeing of our employees and their families. Our benefits programs include, but are not limited to:

• Inclusive and Competitive medical, Rx, dental, and vision coverage
• Family forming benefits
• 13 Paid Holidays
• Flexible Time Off
• 8 hours of paid Volunteer Time off
• Immediate eligibility into Company 401(k) plan with 3.5% company match
• Tuition Reimbursement program for degreed and non-degreed programs
• 1:1 personalized Financial Planning Sessions
• Student Debt Retirement Savings Match program
• Free snacks and refreshments in each office location