Principal Retail Fraud Operations Analyst

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy. Toast is driven by building the all-in-one restaurant platform that helps restaurants operate their business, increase sales, engage guests, and keep employees happy. The Fraud Operations Team at Toast works to prevent fraud for Toast, our customers, and our guests. The team is responsible for fraud prevention across our Fintech suite, from access controls to transaction monitoring.

The Principal Fraud Operations Analyst will play a critical role in identifying and mitigating fraud across Toast’s expanding retail merchant base. This individual will specialize in detecting anomalous processing behavior across merchant types, leveraging deep analytical expertise to recognize when transaction patterns deviate from expected norms within the retail ecosystem.

What You Will Do:

• Monitor fraud queues to identify bad actors and mitigate risk to protect Toast’s retail and restaurant merchant portfolio.
• Conduct detailed investigations using internal tools to detect fraudulent or anomalous activity by merchant category.
• Evaluate merchant-level processing metrics (e.g., average ticket size, transaction frequency, refund ratios) against expected baselines by business type.
• Partner closely with Data, Product, and Risk Engineering teams to define and refine anomaly detection parameters by merchant vertical.
• Review chargeback data and dispute trends to identify emerging retail fraud typologies.
• Provide operational insights and recommendations that inform merchant underwriting, ongoing monitoring, and policy development.
• Suggest and implement improvements to fraud SOPs and detection methodologies, with a focus on the retail ecosystem.
• Serve as a subject-matter expert on retail merchant fraud indicators and typologies across card-present and card-not-present transactions.

Do You Have the Right Ingredients?

• 6+ years of experience in fraud operations or risk analytics, managing large datasets to identify fraud patterns, trends, and anomalies—preferably in merchant acquiring, facilitation, or payment processing.
• Deep understanding of retail merchant behaviors and risk patterns (e.g., high-volume/low-ticket vs. low-volume/high-ticket businesses).
• Proven ability to identify anomalous retail trends, interpret data contextually by merchant category, and translate insights into actionable strategies.
• Strong investigative and analytical mindset; data-driven and curious with a bias for root-cause analysis.
• Familiarity with chargeback processes, Visa/Mastercard rules, and network-level fraud signals.
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and stakeholder management skills.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, evolving environment; able to operate independently and adapt quickly.
• Flexible for US/night shifts and weekend rotations.

Preferred: Proficiency in SQL and experience with Hex, Snowflake, Splunk, or similar tools.

AI at Toast

At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn. We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality. We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired by how our Toasters are already driving real value with them. The people who thrive here are those who embrace changes that let us build more for our customers; it’s a core part of our culture.

Our Total Rewards Philosophy

We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry. Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits.