Senior Merchant Underwriter, Risk Operations

Role Overview: We’re looking for an experienced Merchant Underwriter to join ClarityPay’s Merchant Risk Operations team and own the human-judgment layer of our merchant underwriting process. For more than two years, we’ve underwritten merchants through a workflow that is now largely AI-driven: it gathers and processes merchant information, synthesizes the findings, benchmarks each merchant against our history of previously underwritten merchants, and produces a recommendation - escalating the points that need human review or judgment. Automation handles most of the work, but as our merchant network grows, so does the number of cases that need an expert review. You’ll make those decisions: working on the edge cases, weighing conflicting signals across merchant-provided information, financial statements, public profiles, and litigation history, and providing the final sign-off. You’ll also help sharpen the workflow itself, so your decisions make the system escalate smarter over time. Key Responsibilities: Escalated Underwriting Review & Decisioning Review merchant cases escalated by our AI underwriting workflow, validating its findings and recommendations, and resolving the specific points flagged for human judgment. Provide final underwriting sign-off - approve, decline, or approve with conditions - within defined service levels and ClarityPay’s risk appetite. Handle the most complex, sensitive, or high-exposure merchant cases, exercising independent judgment within established credit and risk policy. Document clear, defensible decision rationale for every case you sign off. Manage a queue of escalated cases, prioritizing exposure and urgency to meet turnaround targets for merchant onboarding and re-underwriting. Merchant Due Diligence & Financial Analysis Conduct hands-on review of merchant information across direct merchant submissions, business verification (KYB) and beneficial ownership, credit reports, public profiles and adverse media, and lawsuits, liens, and judgments. Analyze financial statements and bank data to assess liquidity, profitability, leverage, and the merchant’s capacity to absorb refunds, chargebacks, and losses. Evaluate business model, fulfillment and delivery risk, and industry risk to size ClarityPay’s counterparty exposure to each merchant. Recommend exposure limits, reserves, holdbacks, and other risk mitigants, with clearly documented rationale. Ongoing Monitoring & Re-Underwriting Perform periodic re-underwriting and review escalated monitoring alerts, flagging material changes in merchant performance or risk profile. Incorporate dispute, chargeback, refund, and complaint trends into merchant risk assessments and decisions. Partner with Servicing, Compliance, and merchant-facing teams on merchants requiring remediation, limit changes, or offboarding. Workflow & Automation Improvement Provide structured feedback on the AI workflow recommendations so escalation logic, rules, and benchmarks improve over time. Identify recurring edge cases and recommend policy, data sources, or automation that can be refined to reduce unnecessary escalations. Contribute to underwriting policy, playbooks, SOPs, and decision guidelines that raise consistency across reviewers. Quality, Compliance & Documentation Maintain accurate, audit-ready underwriting records - documents reviewed, findings, decisions, conditions, and approvals - in our case management system. Ensure every decision complies with ClarityPay credit and risk policy and applicable federal and state regulations, including KYB/AML and sanctions requirements. Participate in peer calibration and quality reviews so that decisions stay consistent across underwriters and with historical precedent. What We’re Looking For: Experience: 5–10 years of hands-on merchant underwriting or counterparty risk experience at a merchant acquirer, payment processor, payment facilitator, merchant network, BNPL/fintech lender, or other organization exposed to merchant counterparty