Trust & Risk Team Lead

Whatnot

$90K — $120K *
Consumer Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 7+ years in Trust & Safety, Risk Ops, Support Ops, or Quality; 2+ years leading teams or specialists
  • Hands-on experience with re-review/appeals or escalations
  • Strong analytical skills; comfortable with spreadsheets and dashboards (SQL preferred)
  • Excellent communication skills across Ops, Policy, Product, Data, and Legal
  • Growth mindset with a balance of speed, fairness, and compliance

Responsibilities

  • Manage a pod of appeals specialists, including hiring, onboarding, and coaching
  • Oversee daily processes like intake/triage, evidence gathering, and timely resolutions
  • Handle high-severity appeals and establish conflict-of-interest controls
  • Lead responses to significant incidents within a specialized area
  • Act as the expert in appeals processes, providing guidance on escalations

Benefits

  • Generous holiday and time off policy
  • Health insurance options including medical, dental, and vision
  • Home office setup allowance and monthly stipends for cell phone and internet
  • Wellness and childcare allowances, plus lifetime benefits for family planning
  • 401k with employer match and international pension plans
  • Expect to use the platform as both a buyer and seller with a dedicated budget
  • 16 weeks of paid parental leave and a gradual return-to-work policy
Full Job Description
The Role

As Team Lead, you'll manage a pod of agents and specialists while supporting the scaling of our operational framework within Trust & Risk. You'll run day-to-day triage and re-review workflows, set evidence standards, and partner cross-functionally to ensure fair, fast, and consistent outcomes. Your work improves user trust, reduces wrongful enforcement, and closes the loop on policy clarity.

Lead & operate
  • Manage an agent & specialist pod of ~10 direct reports (hiring input, onboarding, coaching, performance).
  • Own daily execution: intake/triage, evidence gathering, second-level review, and timely resolutions across priority queues.
  • Handle high-severity or sensitive appeals; approve exceptions and ensure conflict-of-interest controls.
  • Take the lead on high severity incidents in an area of expertise.
  • Be the go-to expert for your area of focus, and be able to provide recommendations for escalations or questions from anyone in the company.

Build the team & framework
  • Help scale our operating model: roles, SLAs, triage taxonomy, and weekly rhythm (calibration, case council).
  • Define decision templates and evidence standards; maintain playbooks and version-controlled guidance.
  • Establish escalation paths (Policy/Legal/Product) and criteria for reinstatement vs. uphold decisions.

Measure & improve
  • Partner with Data to instrument dashboards and track Time to Resolve, First Touch Response, and partner with decision quality team to ensure decision quality of appeals specialists is tracked and goaled.
  • Publish weekly insights and root-cause themes; drive fixes with Ops, Policy, Product, and Legal.
  • Contribute requirements to tooling (appeals intake, evidence checklists, audit trails, alerts) and lightweight automation.

Enablement
  • Train frontline teams on operational standards and comms; certify readiness and spot-check adoption.
  • Coordinate change management for new policies/features and volume spikes; maintain user-facing macros/templates that reflect policy.

We offer flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs, and we value in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our Phoenix, AZ hub.

About You
  • Weekend availability is required (one day)
  • 4+ years in Trust & Safety, Risk Ops, Support Ops, or Quality; 2+ years leading operators or specialists.
  • Hands-on experience with re-review/appeals or escalations; strong judgment on edge cases and evidence.
  • Analytical; comfortable with spreadsheets/Sigma (SQL preferred) and actionable dashboards.
  • Excellent communicator across Ops, Policy, Product, Data, and Legal; strong enablement and documentation habits.
  • Growth mindset; balances speed, fairness, and compliance in a fast-moving environment.


Benefits
  • Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
  • Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
  • Work From Home Support
    • Home office setup allowance
    • Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
  • Care Benefits
    • Monthly allowance for wellness
    • Annual allowance towards Childcare
    • Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
  • Retirement; 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally
  • Monthly allowance to dogfood the app
    • All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We're passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).
  • Parental Leave
    • 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work *company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.

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