Payment Operations Manager

What You’ll Do:

Lead Strategy and Scale: Own the comprehensive strategy for the end-to-end payment lifecycle across all current and future channels (e.g., credit/debit cards, ACH, digital wallets, wire transfers). 

Build and Mentor a Team: Take ownership of team growth, initially managing and mentoring one direct report, with the opportunity to scale the function as the company expands.

Optimize and Innovate: Proactively architect payment flows to eliminate operational bottlenecks, championing automation projects that improve processing speeds, maximize authorization rates, and aggressively reduce operational costs. 

Manage High-Stakes Relationships: Act as the primary relationship lead and escalation point for third-party payment providers, processors, acquiring banks, and payment gateways, negotiating operational terms to support business goals.  

Oversee Incident Response and Integrity: Establish advanced monitoring frameworks to catch system anomalies, rapidly troubleshooting high-priority operational incidents in lockstep with Engineering and Finance leaders. 

Govern Compliance and Risk: Design and enforce rigorous daily operational controls and reporting structures to ensure absolute compliance with network rules (e.g., Visa, Mastercard) and strict regulatory standards (e.g., AML, KYC).

Deliver Executive Insights: Transform complex transactional data into high-level operational metrics (fraud trends, settlement timing, chargeback volumes) to provide actionable, strategic recommendations to executive leadership. 

Who You Are:

An Established Leader: You bring 8 to 15 years of professional experience specifically within the Payments Industry (e.g., FinTech, acquiring banks, payment processors, or high-volume merchant environments), with a readiness or proven track record to manage and grow talent. 

An Advanced Payments Expert: You possess a deep, comprehensive mastery of global payment methodologies, including authorization, clearing, and settlement for card networks, as well as alternative networks like ACH, SEPA, and RTP. 

Data-Driven and Analytical: You have the technical acumen to leverage data extraction methods, write SQL queries, and interpret heavy datasets to identify macroeconomic operational trends and diagnose systemic root causes of payment failures.

A Cross-Functional Collaborator: You excel at breaking down silos, communicating technical payment concepts clearly to engineering, finance, and legal partners to drive large-scale infrastructure projects forward.