The posting
Job description
Helcim is growing, and that's good news for merchants and a real workload for our risk team. More businesses are coming to us every month, and each one needs a careful look before we say yes.
There's never a dull moment in risk. Every day you sort the good from the bad, and within a few months you'll have seen hundreds of business models, very different financial profiles, and new ways people try to play the system for their own gain. The job reaches well past credit into compliance, regulatory, fraud, financial, and operational risk, plus edge cases you won't see coming.
What's Hard About It
You'll make credit calls on partial information, then explain those calls to the person whose business is on the other end, and some of those conversations will be uncomfortable. Parts of the job are repetitive, and the work keeps changing underneath you, so you'll feel like a beginner more often than most. The review queue has to clear accurately and on time while you also ask why it looks the way it does. The good part is, you have 3 other people on your team to dive into this with.
What you need 🛠
- 2+ years in commercial credit analysis, underwriting, or portfolio management.
- You can read financial statements and see the business model behind them, across very different industries.
- You're curious enough to keep digging, and you know when you've hit a rabbit hole and it's time to make the call. You back decisions with data and keep batch reviews accurate and on deadline.
- You can explain your findings clearly to colleagues and merchants, including telling a business owner "no" or "not yet" on credit with empathy.
- You have a strong work ethic and want to grow. The work keeps changing, and you're comfortable starting over as a beginner.
- You know SQL, or you're willing to learn it so you can pull your own data and build your own reports.
What you don't need
- Payments experience. We'll teach you the rest.
- A degree in anything specific. Finance can help, but it isn't required.
- A CFA or FRM. If you have one or you're working toward one, great. It won't decide anything.
- SQL fluency on day one.
Not checking every box? Apply anyway. If something would make the interview process more accessible for you, tell us and we'll sort it out.
What your week actually looks like 🔑
- Underwriting new and existing merchants: reviewing financial statements, credit reports, and corporate registrations, then making the call.
- Batch reviews and rolling underwriting: working the portfolio on a schedule, watching trends, and catching exposure before it becomes a loss.
- Merchant conversations: talking with business owners to gather documents, understand their story, clarify financials, structure credit terms that let them grow, and explain decisions, including the ones they don't want to hear.
- Complex cases and working across Helcim: daily risk operations with Trust & Safety, plus working with Data, Product, Engineering, and most other teams, several times a day. You'll tell the people who build our risk tools what's working and what isn't.
- Improving the guidelines: finding where adjudication is slow or unclear and rewriting the rules so it scales.
Credit Risk sits in the middle of the company, so you'll pick up accounting, fraud detection, data, and communication skills that carry through the rest of your career.
Job benefits
- Ownership: Every single team member gets Stock Options. You own a piece of what you build! 📈
- Health First: Comprehensive benefits + a Health Spending Account (HSA) starting Day 1. 🦷
- Flexibility: Hybrid life. In-office Mon/Wed/Fri, remote Tue/Thu. 🏠
- Family Support: Top-ups for maternity leave and "bonding breaks." 👶
- Rest & Recharge: Paid vacation + a full company break in December. ❄️
- Growth: $500 annual training budget to keep your skills sharp. 📚
How hiring works:
Three conversations, start to finish.
- Recruiter screen. A call with Caileigh, our Recruiter about your experience and what you're looking for. We cover comp in full here, and it's a good time to ask us anything.
- First interview with Scott, our Team Lead, Credit Risk, and the person this role reports to. This is a conversation about how you think about credit and how you like to work.
- In-person technical. You'll review real merchant files, work through the documents, and decide whether each one should become a Helcim merchant.
How We Work @ Helcim
Four things we hold each other to: we build rather than wait, we take the harder path when it's the right one, we earn trust every day, and we get more done together than apart. The long version is our culture book, The Way of the Helcim.
Candidates must be eligible to work in Canada and be located in Calgary.
