Fraud & Risk Analyst at CPOS
Ottawa, ON · On-site · Full-time, permanent · $70,000–$85,000
Standard business hours, Monday to Friday.
About CPOS
CPOS is an Ottawa payments company. CPOS Pay is our app for the one-person business that runs everything off a phone: the plumber, the market vendor, the cleaner. Taking a payment is where it starts. We're building the app into the back office they could never otherwise afford.
The team is small enough that you'll know everyone's name. Nobody here waits on three levels of approval, and the work you do on Monday tends to show up in the numbers by Friday.
The role
Accounts on our platform get flagged for review. Someone has to look at each one and answer a question that is harder than it sounds: is this a real business, and do we want to work with them?
That is the job. You'll also be the person on the other end when a merchant's funds are on hold, explaining what we need, why we need it, and when they'll have their money.
You'll sit in our risk function and work day to day with support, product and the CEO.
What you'll actually do
- Review flagged accounts and make the approve, reject or hold decision
- Watch approved accounts for activity that doesn't fit the business, and act before it becomes a loss
- Request and assess verification documents: business registration, invoices, banking details, evidence the business operates
- Run identity and business verification (KYC/KYB), and work the cases where the documents don't hold up
- Own merchant communication on held funds: document requests, status updates, questions about fees
- Handle chargebacks and disputes, including recovering funds after a loss
- Write up cases, including the ones we got wrong, so the next decision is better informed
- Flag detection rules that misfire and propose changes with the evidence attached
- Keep the case bank current
The hard part
Some of the people signing up aren't running a business at all. They pass identity verification. Their paperwork looks fine. When we ask for proof the business is real, some of what comes back is borrowed, fabricated, or belongs to someone else.
Telling that apart from a legitimate small business owner having a confusing week is not something a checklist does. It takes someone who notices that the pieces don't fit, and then works out why.
Getting it wrong the other way costs just as much. A merchant we hold up unnecessarily is a business owner who can't reach their own money, and they often don't come back.
What good looks like
First 30 days. You understand how verification and review work here and why they're built this way. You're clearing straightforward reviews yourself. Merchants waiting on us are getting clearer answers sooner. You've started noticing where our rules misfire.
By six months. You're making final calls across most of the queue, with authority granted in stages as you show the judgment. Good merchants get through faster, bad ones are caught earlier, and you can show both. You've begun proposing changes to the rules themselves, with the evidence behind them rather than a hunch.
By nine months. You own a component of the risk system end to end. Every decision that went wrong is written up, so the team gets smarter rather than just you.
Who we're looking for
We care more about how you think than where you've worked.
- Street smarts. You clock when something doesn't add up before you can fully explain it, then go find out why.
- You hold your ground. People will call you angry, urgent and very convincing, and some of them will be lying. Pressure is itself information. You need to read it that way and stay professional while you do.
- You reason rather than tick boxes. The interesting cases are the ones no rule covers.
- You work independently. Fraud patterns change constantly and the playbook has to be rewritten as they do. You'll have a hand in that.
Experience. Roughly two years or more in work where you made real judgment calls about people or financial documents. Fraud or risk at a fintech is the obvious fit, especially if you helped build the system rather than operate someone else's. Insurance, lending, financial services, customer support and sales all produce people who do this well. If your background doesn't match this exactly and you still think you can do the work, apply.
On the technical side. You don't need to write production code. You do need to be comfortable pulling your own data (SQL or strong spreadsheet skills), working in no-code automation tools, and having an opinion about how the tooling should behave. We use our payments platform's risk and identity tools, HubSpot, n8n and a set of internal tools. AI is part of the daily workflow here (case enrichment, document checks, automated flagging), not a slide in a deck.
What you get
- $70,000–$85,000, depending on experience
- Equity. Stock options, sized at offer. You own a piece of what you're building.
- Real decision authority, early, granted in stages as your judgment shows
- A function being built rather than maintained. We're moving off our processor's fraud tools and onto a risk system of our own. The people who build it are the people who run it later.
What we're honest about
Some of this is repetitive. You'll read a lot of documents and have the same conversation with different merchants more than once.
Some of it has no precedent at all. You'll make a call that turns out wrong, we'll look at it together, and we'll fix the rule. That's the arrangement, not a failure of it.
If you want a finished playbook with an escalation path for every scenario, this isn't the right role. If you'd rather write that playbook, it is.
How we work
Slack first. Notion for anything structured. Meetings when they're needed and async when they're not. Everyone here wears more than one hat.
How hiring works here
Before we meet we'll send you a couple of questions and a real case (anonymized, one we actually had to decide). The conversation is then about how you think rather than what's on your CV. There's no answer key; we're reading the reasoning.
After that you'll meet the team in Ottawa.
We move quickly, and we'll tell you where you stand.
This posting is for a new position.
CPOS uses artificial intelligence–enabled tools to support parts of the recruitment process, including résumé screening. All hiring decisions are made by our hiring team.
CPOS is an equal opportunity employer. We assess applicants without regard to race, colour, ancestry, place of origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, marital or family status, disability, or any other ground protected by the Ontario Human Rights Code. Accommodation is available at every stage of the hiring process under the AODA. Tell us what you need at hr@cpos.com
