What is risk

Risk is variability. 

What are you trying to answer? In the "real" world people don't refer to jobs as middle or front office, that term is thrown around here a bunch but I almost never hear it in a professional setting. 

Jobs, groups, departments have different sets of responsibilities. Risk groups can have different responsibilities at different firms (some more cross cutting, some play a larger role in how a division is run, others much smaller, etc) but your question is hard to engage with. 

Anything that's not IBD is not front

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Where I work it is considered Middle Office

Corporate/investment credit risk is middle office.

Retail credit risk is back office as fuck.

Pure market risk is a blend of middle/front office.

Are you doing this to find a job? If so, then you should take the time to learn about the appropriate way to think about the Risk department. 

Most Risk professionals don't think of themselves are FO or BO. It's more about where you work to monitor risk, this is referred to as first line, second line and third line. 

Your role in the process determines which line you are in. Generally speaking, it goes like this:

1. The manager at local office/branch that monitors their credit operations is first line
2. The manager in Risk that creates & enforces policies for the local managers to follow is second line
3. The manager that creates tools to monitor risk and monitors them across the enterprise and gives second line a list of breaches to investigate is third line. This line can also be enforced by audit; audit is commonly referred to as third line. 

I'm giving a general example above but you should be able to see how it applies to any number of operations a bank does and why the FO/BO designation really doesn't make sense. If you start talking with a Risk professional about FO/BO they're going to look at you like a rube, but if you ask which line they work in then you sound much more sophisticated. 

Please ignore GoingtobeanMD's response as it relates purely to IT/systems risk which is not relevant to your question. Risk like finance is a horizontal function that spreads across departments and what you want specifically is the credit/lending area not the IT area.

Not to shill too much here but in my opinion risk is one of the best areas to be in when looking at the WLB/interesting work/comp trade off.

Anyways regarding your question I will speak to corporate banking credit risk as that's what I believe you're asking. 

This area of credit risk focuses on determining whether to approve or deny a loan to a business and the maximum loan amount to lend that business. While the relationship managers/MD are the ones wining and dining clients and their specific team working on drafting a lot of the execution based documents, the credit risk group is building financial models with many scenarios to determine what type of cash flow the business will get in the future or if the business will go bankrupt. Some of you who are more familiar with debt may be wondering why doesn't the bank just use the popular bond ratings from S&P, Moody's, etc? There are a couple reasons for this. One is that the business being rated by these agencies is often the ones paying for the service. Hence, there is an incentive in cases where a judgement call is needed for these rating agencies to round up their rating score. The difference between one bracket and the next may not be that material for those who use the scores as a rough guide, but when we are talking about multi million dollar loans, it absolutely matters. Another reason is that bond ratings are aggregate level probabilities. What this means is that if a company has a bond rating of A, there is an associated probability that the company defaults. But there are no additional factors taken into account such as forecasted financial ratios. Those are used to create the rating, but even within companies that are an A, some will be more creditworthy than others, so to get a more precise understanding of a company, more factors need to be taken into account. 

By definition this role is an MO role as the group directly works with FO who directly works with clients. However credit risk has a very important role in the credit lending process so Id argue they aren't any better or worse than the relationship team. Certain personalities will be drawn to one, others to the other. 
 

PS what does your emoji mean?

Were these guys in Margin Call front office or middle office?