Brex Compliance / Risk Analyst Interview Questions

1.Tell me about a compliance or risk issue you discovered that technically belonged to another team. How did you decide to handle it, and what happened?

2.Walk me through a risk memo or compliance policy document you wrote that actually changed how your team operated. What was in it and how did it land?

3.Describe a time you pushed back on a quick fix to a compliance or control gap because you thought it would create bigger problems down the road. What did you propose instead and how did it play out?

4.Tell me about a time you had to deliver a risk finding or compliance gap to a business team that didn't want to hear it. How did you frame it and what happened to the relationship afterward?

5.Tell me about a regulatory or policy ambiguity you had to resolve without clear guidance from legal or a senior person — where you had to make a call and own it. What was your reasoning and what did you do when the answer wasn't obvious?

6.Walk me through a compliance framework, control matrix, or risk assessment you built from scratch that became the standard your team actually used. What made it stick when other documentation doesn't?

7.Estimate the number of suspicious activity reports Brex's compliance team might file in a given year. Walk me through how you'd think about it.

8.A startup customer on the Brex Card calls to dispute a transaction they say they didn't make — but when you pull the account, the spend pattern, device fingerprint, and merchant category all look consistent with their history. How do you think through the dispute?

9.Brex is considering whether to allow cannabis-adjacent payment processors — not dispensaries themselves, but software companies that serve them — onto the Brex Spend Management platform. Walk me through how you'd frame the risk assessment for that decision.

10.You're building a risk-tiering model for Brex's small business customers at onboarding — the goal is to assign each new account a risk score that drives enhanced due diligence decisions. What variables do you include, how do you weight them, and what are the failure modes you'd watch for?

11.Brex is about to acquire a smaller fintech to expand its bill pay capabilities. You've been asked to do the compliance due diligence. What are the five biggest risks you're trying to uncover, and how would you structure the review to actually find them — not just check boxes?

12.It's Q4 and Brex is under a consent order from a banking partner that requires reducing high-risk customer exposure by 20% within 90 days. Your team has to decide which customers to offboard. How do you build the methodology, and what's the hardest part of executing it?

13.Walk me through how you'd run a BSA/AML transaction monitoring review for a startup customer on the Brex Card that suddenly spikes to 10x their normal monthly spend.

14.How do you assess the compliance risk of onboarding a new business category — say, crypto companies or cannabis-adjacent businesses — onto Brex Spend Management?

15.You're reviewing Brex's KYB process and notice a pattern where a specific document combination is passing automated checks but a handful of those businesses later show fraud indicators. How do you investigate and what do you recommend?

16.Brex is expanding Brex Empower into a new country. Walk me through how you'd build the compliance readiness checklist for that launch, and what would make you say the company isn't ready yet.

17.Brex processes billions in card transaction volume. If you were designing a risk-based approach to setting transaction controls — like velocity limits or merchant category restrictions — on Brex Card, what variables would you use and how would you calibrate them?

18.You discover that a control your team relies on to satisfy a bank partner's AML requirement has been partially broken for six months — data wasn't flowing correctly. How do you handle the next 72 hours, and what does your retroactive remediation look like?

19.A Brex Card customer — a fast-growing e-commerce startup — contacts support saying their card was declined mid-checkout during a peak sale event. You pull the account and see it hit a velocity limit you own. How do you handle the next hour?

20.You're onboarding a new enterprise customer onto Brex Empower and their submitted beneficial ownership docs list a holding company in a jurisdiction your screening tool flags as elevated risk. The deal is significant and the sales rep is pushing for approval. What's your process?

21.You're reviewing expense reports submitted through Brex Spend Management and you notice a pattern: a cluster of employees at one corporate customer are splitting large purchases across multiple transactions just below the approval threshold. It looks like it could be policy circumvention — or it could be coincidence. How do you investigate and what do you do if you can't get a clear answer?

22.Brex is about to launch a new rewards feature on the Brex Card that involves third-party merchant partnerships. Legal says it's fine, product is ready to ship, but you see a potential UDAP risk in how the rewards terms are written — nothing certain, just a judgment call. Launch is in three days. What do you do?

23.You're the primary compliance contact for Brex's relationship with a key banking partner. During a routine call, their BSA officer mentions they've seen unusual transaction patterns from Brex's portfolio and are 'keeping an eye on it.' No formal inquiry, no request — just a casual comment. How do you handle what happens next?

24.Your team is understaffed and you're triaging a queue of 40 open compliance reviews — a mix of SAR candidates, KYB renewals for existing customers, and a new regulatory exam prep task your manager just assigned. You can realistically complete 15 this week. How do you decide what gets done and what gets documented as deprioritized?

25.Tell me about a time you had to get a sales or business development team to slow down or change their approach because of a compliance concern. How did you get them on board?

26.Describe a time you were the only compliance voice in a cross-functional meeting and the room had already made up its mind. What did you do?

27.Tell me about a time you needed a product or engineering team to prioritize a compliance fix that wasn't on their roadmap. How did you make the case and what happened?

28.You're six weeks into a new compliance initiative that your manager greenlit, and a senior leader from a different business unit tells you it's going to create too much friction for their team and they want it paused. Your manager is traveling. What do you do?

29.Tell me about a time you had to align two internal teams that had genuinely conflicting interests around a compliance or risk decision — not just different opinions, but interests that were actually at odds. How did you navigate it?

30.A key external partner — say a bank partner or a card network — raises a concern directly with you about how Brex is handling something in your area of ownership. You think they're overreading it, but they're a critical relationship. How do you handle it, and how do you manage the internal side?