Financial Risk Specialists

Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. At 7 the split is real but lopsided: backtesting, limit monitoring, counterparty exposure aggregation, sensitivity tables and the SR 11-7 model documentation boilerplate are all rules-plus-prose work that tooling handles end-to-end, and only scenario design and the effective-challenge conversation with model risk management resist — enough to keep you above the 6 line, not enough to reach mixed territory.

Fully desk- and screen-based. A 1 reflects that everything you touch is a data warehouse query, a Python or SAS job, a Bloomberg terminal and a committee deck; the only physical requirement is being in the room for the quarterly risk committee, and that room is increasingly a Zoom call.

Certification preferred, not legally required. FRM, PRM or CFA are hiring signals rather than legal prerequisites, and when a CCAR submission or CECL reserve is wrong it is the CFO and CRO who attest under Sarbanes-Oxley and to the Fed — a 6 rather than 3 because model owner sign-off and the OCC's expectation of a named independent validator do put your name in an examinable file.

Some relationship component. An 8 covers the fact that examiners, auditors and the trading desks you police come to know and calibrate to you personally over years of credibility on assumptions, but the deliverable itself — a 10-Q disclosure figure, a limit breach memo — is institutional output that survives your replacement.

Meaningful discretion. 13 sits at the top of real discretion because you decide which tail scenarios enter the stress suite, when to override a model that is mispricing a regime shift, and how to word a material weakness — high-stakes ambiguous calls, but ones ratified by a committee and a board risk charter rather than owned alone.