Associate Director- Risk

About Us:

Setu is reimagining the digital financial future of India. Our products power onboarding, payments, lending, deposits, and financial data flows for dozens of businesses, making complex journeys simple, secure & scalable.

Role Overview:

At Setu, we believe in collaboration- both in action and spirit. Setu has been partnering with diverse FIs to sell-to, sell-with and co-create innovative products. In the last 6 months, we have specifically signed a few marquee partners to co-sell. Now we are looking to build the partnership team as a separate business function to start contributing to revenue. On the other side, we work with many critical data partners like NSDL, e-Mudra among others to co-create some of our key products.

This role is special since it will give you the opportunity to look at the entire market and not be limited by any particular segment or use case. You along with your team can bring immense value to organization by thinking out of the box and bringing business from the initially non-comprehended avenues.

Role Purpose

Risk is core to everything we do especially in financial services, where trust, reliability, and compliance are non-negotiable. As our ecosystem grows in scale and complexity, the way we manage risk must evolve. This role is critical to safeguarding the integrity of our systems and protecting customers from fraud, misuse, and operational lapses. But we're not looking to just manage risk we're looking to redefine how it's done using automation, intelligence, and AI-first thinking. As the Risk Team Lead, you'll be responsible for designing real-time monitoring systems, ensuring AML compliance, and driving efficient dispute resolution. More importantly, you'll lead our transition to AI-led risk infrastructure by embedding intelligence into decision-making, triaging, fraud detection, and operations.

What will you do at Setu

Build & Scale Intelligent Monitoring:

• Design real-time risk detection frameworks that combine heuristics, behavioral signals, and learning systems.
• Identify gaps in existing rule-based systems and lead the shift toward intelligent automation and pattern-based detection.
• Champion the use of AI models to reduce noise, prioritize alerts, and flag complex fraud scenarios like mule rings and synthetic identities.

Drive Smart Dispute & Chargeback Operations:

• Lead a team managing end-to-end dispute resolution with banks and regulators.
• Use AI-powered workflows (e.g., smart routing, NLP-driven classification, evidence summarization) to improve resolution speed and accuracy.
• Work closely with ops and tech to reduce friction in the dispute lifecycle and prevent recurring edge cases.

Build Feedback Loops for Learning:

• Partner with engineering and data science to train, test, and deploy internal ML models for anomaly detection, risk scoring, or merchant tiering.
• Establish strong feedback loops from frontline operations to continuously improve the quality and outcomes of automated risk decisions.
• Advocate for explainability and audit-readiness in any intelligence deployed.

Reimagine Onboarding & Merchant Risk:

• Identify opportunities to embed AI into onboarding: KYB validations, document parsing, website analysis, and content checks.
• Build processes that flag high-risk merchants using patterns in application data, transaction behavior, and external signals.

Lead the Function, Set the Vision:

• Define what modern risk ops should look like in a scaled payments environment.
• Build a team that's not just strong in operations, but fluent in automation, experimentation, and systems thinking.
• Collaborate with leadership, compliance, and tech to make AI a foundational part of how Setu safeguards its platform.

Who is the right fit for this role

• You've led or contributed significantly to risk/fraud initiatives where AI or ML played a central role. You understand how intelligence can make risk systems smarter whether it's prioritizing alerts, auto-detecting patterns, or improving operational efficiency.
• You've worked closely with engineering or data teams to bring automation into production, not just prototype ideas.
• You're process-oriented, but know when to question old playbooks and replace them with better ones.
• You bring sharp judgment and high ownership you're not afraid to make calls when the stakes are high.
• You care about building teams, not just systems and can lead others through ambiguity, scale, and transformation.

Why Join Setu:

Lead growth marketing for high-impact fintech products, work with AI-powered workflows, and collaborate across product, brand, and business growth teams to make a measurable impact on India's digital financial ecosystem.