Senior Program Manager, Payment Operations - Payment Optimization
$129,500–$207,000 year
On-siteBoston, Massachusetts, United States or Bellevue, Washington, United States
Job Summary
Own the operational health, performance, and optimization roadmap for advanced authorization capabilities, stored payment, and recurring flows, including multi-authorization scenarios and multiple merchant category code configurations. Define and monitor key metrics such as payment success rate, authorization performance, retry recovery, and operational SLA adherence while identifying defects and reliability risks across complex card-not-present and tokenization workflows. Lead cross-functional programs with Product, Engineering, Finance, and external partners to drive incident response, partner escalations, and measurable improvements in customer retention and cost efficiency. Analyze issuer and network trends to quantify impact and build executive-ready narratives connecting payment performance to business outcomes.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in business, finance, operations, technology, or related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 8+ years of experience in payments, fintech, ecommerce, retail, subscription billing, omnichannel operations, or another scaled operational environment
- 5+ years leading complex cross-functional programs with Product, Engineering, Analytics, Finance, Accounting, Customer Care/Operations, Legal/Compliance, and external partners
- Experience supporting complex order and payment scenarios where a single order or customer transaction may require multiple authorizations, MCC configurations, settlement paths, or downstream reconciliation
- Demonstrated experience owning payment KPIs and operational outcomes such as payment success rate, authorization rate, decline rate, retry recovery, backup payment method performance, involuntary churn, dispute rate, reconciliation quality, cost of payments, or operational SLA performance
- Direct experience with card-not-present and recurring payment flows, including processors, acquirers, issuers, card networks, digital wallets, stored credentials, tokenization, account updater, settlement, refunds, disputes, and reconciliation
- Experience supporting ecommerce, subscription, and repeat purchase payment environments where reliability directly affects customer retention and business performance
- Strong analytical capability with the ability to use payment data, processor reporting, decline trends, authorization performance, customer feedback, and operational defects to identify root causes and drive action
- Proven ability to operate in ambiguity, dive deep into details, and lead teams through issue resolution without direct authority
- Strong vendor and partner management experience, including performance reviews, escalations, SLA management, roadmap alignment, and operational improvement plans
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience preparing executive-level narratives, business reviews, and decision recommendations
- Ability to deliver time-sensitive initiatives while maintaining strong attention to detail and ownership of follow-through
- Ability to travel up to 15% of the time
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with payment models that include multi-authorization flows, multiple MCC configurations, settlement, and reconciliation
- Experience improving authorization performance through issuer, network, processor, card type, tokenization, digital wallet, debit routing, MCC, or decline-code analysis
- Experience launching or scaling payment capabilities that support high-volume stored payment methods
- Experience improving payment observability, operational support models, and partner performance in a high-volume environment
- Experience with card-not-present payment operations, including ecommerce, fintech, subscription, or other complex digital payment workflows
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