Onboarding Risk Manager

What do we do?

Paddle offers digital product companies a completely different approach to their payment infrastructure. Instead of assembling and maintaining a complex stack of payments-related apps and services, we’re a Merchant of Record for our customers. That means we take away 100% of the pain of payment fragmentation. It’s faster, safer, cheaper, and, above all, way better.

We’re backed by investors including KKR, FTV Capital, Kindred, Notion, and 83North and serve over 6000 software sellers in 245 territories globally.

The role:

We are looking for a highly motivated self-starter who will bring with them a solid background in leadership, process optimisation and onboarding risk management in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. You will manage our Onboarding Risk team, with analysts and leads across 3 different regions (NA, UK/EU, APAC). The Onboarding Risk team is the first line of defence for identifying fraud and payment-related risks during account onboarding.

As the Onboarding Risk Manager, you will report to and support the Head of Risk & Compliance to identify and drive improvements to ensure our risk processes are holistic, compliant, and of exceptional standards.

Your key responsibilities will be:

• Lead the day-to-day operations of the Onboarding Risk team, ensuring consistent, high-quality risk decisions and throughput

• Manage, coach, and develop team members and team leads; set clear goals, feedback rhythms, and performance standards

• Provide expert support on complex or high-risk applications, including escalations and judgement-based decision-making

• Own onboarding risk procedures: document, maintain, and continuously improve processes, controls, and playbooks

• Build strong relationships across Risk and with key internal and external stakeholders to enable effective decisioning and smooth execution

• Oversee and strengthen onboarding risk management, ensuring policies and controls are applied effectively and proportionately

In addition to your key day-to-day responsibilities you will also collaborate with the Legal, Support and Product teams in projects to help improve the Risk & Compliance function at Paddle. You will also have the opportunity to assist with recommendations or decisions on company risk-related matters with the Head of Risk & Compliance.

Previous experience in line management is required as you will work to support the growth and development of the teams. Knowledge of scheme rules and legislation around acquiring would be beneficial as well as any prior experience building/updating risk related processes.

This role is ideally based in the UK, but we are willing to consider applications +/- 1 GMT.

What you'll do:

• Line manage the Onboarding Risk function across all regions, aligning priorities, coverage, and decision standards

• Act as a subject-matter expert for onboarding processes (KYB, KYC, Screening, Final Reviews), risk assessment, and decisioning frameworks

• Partner closely with leaders and peers beyond your immediate domain (Sales, Customer Support, Operations, and Engineering) to ensure onboarding delivers both strong risk outcomes and an excellent customer experience

• Manage and influence key cross-functional relationships to unblock decisions, resolve issues, and drive process improvements

• Develop, implement, and maintain onboarding processes and procedures—documenting internally and externally where needed

• Demonstrate broad knowledge of cross-functional dependencies, aligning processes to optimise outcomes for the Onboarding Risk queues.

• Handle complex escalations, make sound judgement calls (including with incomplete information), and ensure decisions are well-reasoned and appropriately recorded

• Communicate clearly and concisely with stakeholders at all levels, including translating risk decisions into customer-appropriate narratives where required

• Provid