Senior Director of Operational Risk (Framework & Governance)

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by our unique combination of proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 200,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, Rippling, Navan, Qantas, SHEIN and many more – with fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, spend management and treasury, to embedded finance at a global scale.

Proudly founded in Melbourne, we have a team of over 2,200 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 26 offices around the globe. Valued at US$8 billion and backed by world-leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, Robinhood Ventures, Sequoia, Salesforce Ventures, DST Global, and Lone Pine Capital, Airwallex is leading the charge in building the global payments and financial platform of the future. If you’re ready to do the most ambitious work of your career, join us.

Attributes We Value

We hire successful builders with founder-like energy who want real impact, accelerated learning, and true ownership. You bring strong role-related expertise and sharp thinking, and you’re motivated by our mission and operating principles. You move fast with good judgment, dig deep with curiosity, and make decisions from first principles, balancing speed and rigor.

You're humble and collaborative; turn zero‑to‑one ideas into real products, and you “get stuff done” end-to-end. You use AI to work smarter and solve problems faster. Here, you’ll tackle complex, high‑visibility problems with exceptional teammates and grow your career as we build the future of global banking. If that sounds like you, let’s build what’s next.

About the team

The Global Risk team at Airwallex plays a critical role in enabling the company’s growth by building a strong, scalable, and globally consistent approach to risk management. The team works across the business to define risk appetite, develop frameworks and policies, support strategic decision-making, and provide oversight of key risks as Airwallex expands across products, markets, and regulatory environments. You’ll be part of a highly collaborative group that partners closely with Product, Engineering, Operations, Commercial, Financial Crime Compliance, Regulatory Compliance, and Legal teams to help Airwallex grow responsibly and with confidence. This is a team where you’ll tackle complex, high-impact challenges, shape how risk is managed at a global fintech, and help build the foundations for long-term scale.

What you'll do

Airwallex is building a standalone global second line of defense, and this role will be central to that evolution.

As Global Lead of Operational Risk, you will build and lead the global framework that helps Airwallex identify, measure, escalate, and reduce operational risk across a fast-growing, high-transaction fintech platform.

This is a senior leadership role for someone who can challenge deeply, think systemically, and partner credibly with executives across Product, Engineering, Operations, Finance, and regional teams to make sure the business can scale without compromising resilience, regulatory standing, or customer trust.

This role is based in the US or EMEA.

Responsibilities:

• Architect, own, and continuously evolve Airwallex’s global Operational Risk Framework, including the standards, governance, and escalation protocols for how operational risks are identified, assessed, monitored, and remediated across the company.

• Establish and lead core operational risk programs across event and loss management, risk assessments, recovery and resolution, fraud risk governance, and third-party risk management, translating major incidents and control failures into actionable insight and durable remediation.

• Serve as the senior 2LoD authority for operational risk boundary breaches, including tracking systemic exposures, driving root cause analysis, escalating material issues, and holding first-line leaders accountable for timely and sustainable risk reduction.

• Lead the 2LoD controls model for operational risk, directing and strengthening a controls center of excellence that supervises and challenges the control environment across Technology, Operations, Finance, Product, and other critical business areas.

• Drive a more modern, scalable control environment by pushing the organization toward automated, data-driven controls and embedded guardrails that can keep pace with continuous product launches, engineering change, and platform growth.

• Define the second-line approach to fraud risk governance and partner with first-line teams to challenge fraud controls, model effectiveness, chargeback mitigation, and platform vulnerabilities without creating unnecessary friction for customers or the business.

• Enforce a rigorous global third-party risk governance approach across critical outsourced and ecosystem dependencies, including cloud providers, clearing and payment partners, and other material service providers, with clear expectations for materiality, continuity, substitutability, and exit planning.

• Own the second-line framework for operational resilience, business continuity, crisis triggers, and recovery and resolution readiness, including scenario testing and tabletop exercises that verify the business can withstand major outages, third-party failures, and other severe disruptions.

• Produce high-quality operational risk reporting and documentation for executive leadership, governance forums, regulators, auditors, and bank partners, and support major regulatory and licensing initiatives with regulator-grade frameworks and evidence.

Who you are

We’re looking for people who meet the minimum requirements for this role. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but are not mandatory.

Minimum qualifications:

• You have 12 to 15+ years of experience across operational risk, enterprise risk, technology risk, operational resilience, or related control disciplines within financial services, banking, payments, or fintech.

• You have at least 5+ years of senior leadership experience managing global or multi-regional risk and control teams in a second-line environment.

• You have built and scaled end-to-end operational risk frameworks, including risk and control self-assessments, key risk indicators, loss event management, issue management, and escalation governance.

• You have led or materially strengthened second-line oversight of first-line controls across functions such as Technology, Operations, Finance, or Product.

• You have direct experience with third-party risk management, including risk tiering, due diligence, ongoing oversight, and governance of critical outsourcing or vendor relationships.

• You have experience designing, maintaining, or defending business continuity, operational resilience, recovery planning, or resolution-related frameworks in regulated environments.

• You are able to engage credibly with senior executives, regulators, auditors, and cross-functional stakeholders, and you know how to challenge constructively in a fast-moving environment.

• You have a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Finance, Technology, Engineering, Law, or a related discipline.

• You have deep knowledge of operational risk methodologies and frameworks such as Basel operational risk principles, COSO, ISO standards, or equivalent approaches.

Preferred qualifications:

• You have experience leading operational risk in a cloud-native, API-first, high-growth fintech, payments platform, neobank, or other technology-led financial institution.

• You have strong technical fluency and can engage effectively on topics such as cloud infrastructure, software development lifecycles, platform dependencies, and control design in modern engineering environments.

• You have direct experience overseeing fraud risk governance in digital payments, including areas such as account takeover, onboarding fraud, merchant fraud, or card-not-present fraud.

• You have a track record of modernizing traditional controls through automation, analytics, GRC tooling, or data-driven monitoring.

• You have experience coordinating through major live incidents or crises such as platform outages, cloud failures, payment rail disruption, or critical partner failure.

• You hold an advanced degree or relevant professional certifications such as CRISC, CISA, CAMS, CFE, BCI, or equivalent.

Applicant Safety Policy: Fraud and Third-Party Recruiters

To protect you from recruitment scams, please be aware that Airwallex will not ask for bank details, sensitive ID numbers (i.e. passport), or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page.

Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Airwallex will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s). Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes to Airwallex on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary.

Equal opportunity

Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don’t regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.