Director, Payment Operations

About the role

The Director of Payment Operations owns the company's global payments strategy, covering processing, acquiring, payment methods, orchestration, authorization optimization and day-to-day operations. The role is responsible for the performance, scalability, reliability and economics of the payments ecosystem and works closely with Product, Engineering, Finance, Risk, Compliance, Legal and Commercial teams. Some positions require full-time in-office attendance.

Key responsibilities

• Execute the global payments strategy and roadmap, including processing, acquiring, payment methods, routing and geographic expansion
• Manage relationships with acquirers, processors, gateways, PSPs and card networks, including selection, onboarding, contracts and SLAs
• Optimize multi-acquirer and multi-processor setups for redundancy, pricing and global coverage
• Improve authorization and approval rates by analyzing declines, retries, cascading, tokenization and account updater performance
• Build intelligent routing strategies and experimentation frameworks to measure the impact of changes
• Own payment economics (interchange, assessments, processor fees, cross-border costs), negotiate rates and terms and build financial models for partner proposals
• Work with Risk, Fraud and Compliance to keep chargebacks within acceptable levels and meet card-network rules
• Ensure stable, resilient operations with incident, outage, settlement and reconciliation processes, plus automation and change-management controls
• Partner with Product and Engineering on payment capabilities and evaluate gateways, orchestration platforms and alternative payment methods
• Lead and develop the payments team, report to senior leadership and represent the company with banks, networks and partners

Required profile

• 8+ years of experience in payments, fintech, e-commerce, banking or a related industry
• 3+ years of senior leadership experience managing payments teams or setting payments strategy
• Proven track record managing processor relationships and negotiating commercial terms
• Experience working cross-functionally with Product and Engineering teams
• Nice to have: multi-processor/multi-acquirer experience, high-volume subscription or marketplace payment environments, cross-country currency experience, knowledge of card-network rules and regulatory requirements, and experience negotiating large-scale agreements

Required skills

• Deep knowledge of the card payments ecosystem: acquirers, processors, gateways, PSPs, card networks, issuers, orchestration, tokenization, 3DS/SCA, chargebacks, fraud and alternative payment methods
• Strong grasp of payment economics (interchange, assessments, fees, reserves, pricing)
• Strong analytical skills, turning transaction-level data into business decisions
• Experience with authorization improvement, routing and payment experimentation
• SQL or similar analytical tools (nice to have)