Payment Operations Lead
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Job Summary
Global expansion is broken. Without a local company conversion rates fall costs rise and compliance gets messy. Outpost fixes it.
Selling internationally is a maze of tax payments and operational friction. Most brands avoid it or expand slowly and expensively.
Outpost is your modular back office for global commerce.
Pick only what you need - tax payments treasury or operations - and unlock new markets without the overhead. Sometimes we become liable for a merchants taxes. Sometimes we become the legal reseller in each market and carry the payments tax and compliance risk. Other times we give you the tools to do it yourself.
We go live wherever a merchant needs to sell next for digital and physical goods. That means we own the full stack - payments tax compliance treasury and merchant experience.
Sell anything anywhere. Without compromise.
Were looking for a Payment Operations hire to own the part of Outpost where the money actually moves.
When we become the legal reseller in a market we take the payment. Every merchant we onboard gets its own merchant ID and its own merchant category code never pooled into one shared code which is exactly why our approval rates beat the alternatives. Keeping that true across every market every processor and every merchant is the job.
This is a quantitative role in an operational seat. Youll live in the transaction data: why authorisation rates differ by market issuer card type and hour of day what a routing change is actually worth where a 40 basis point cost difference is hiding which decline codes are recoverable and which are noise. Then youll act on it with processors with engineering and with merchants.
You wont be siloed. Payments at Outpost touches pricing treasury tax and the product roadmap and youll be pulled into all of it. But your edge is the numbers and we want someone whose first instinct on any problem is to pull the data and model it.
Youll work directly with the founding team and with engineering who will build what you spec.
Yes the work is intense. But in return youll get scope and exposure most people wait 10 to 20 years to access.
Youll own economics that decide whether the company is profitable negotiate with processors and banks as a principal rather than a customer and get to see the full machinery of cross-border payments from the inside. We wont handhold but well coach you hard.
Build the system
Run payment operations agentically. Build agentic system that monitor approval rates triage declines assemble dispute evidence chase reconciliation breaks and draft the processor follow-up so humans only touch the exceptions. Youll design the workflows set the guardrails and audit what the agents produce
Write the playbooks: new processor onboarding new market launch incident response dispute handling
Onboard new processors banking partners and local acquiring as we launch new markets
Own payments performance
Own approval rates by market processor issuer card type and merchant and know why each one moves
Build and run routing logic. Decide what goes where prove the uplift and iterate
Run decline recovery: retry logic network tokens account updater 3DS strategy and exemption handling
Run chargeback operations and fraud strategy. Set thresholds represent disputes keep merchants inside scheme limits
Own the payment incident path. When authorisations drop in one market at youre the one who spots it and fixes it
Own the economics
Build full visibility into cost per transaction: scheme fees interchange processor margin FX and where each one leaks
Own processor relationships day to day. Performance reviews pricing negotiations new partner evaluation
Model the trade-off between approval rate and cost by market and make the call
Feed real payment economics into how we price merchants
Own the money movement
Settlement reconciliation and payouts. Every penny accounted for every break chased down
Reserve logic and settlement timing by merchant segment and risk profile
Work with treasury on funding FX exposure and cash timing across our local companies
Take a market from a 66% approval rate to 90% or better and prove exactly which changes did it
Build the routing framework that optimises approval rate against cost market by market
Renegotiate processor pricing using our own volume and performance data
Build the cost-per-transaction model across every processor and market and find the basis points nobody is watching
Debug delays in settlement and fix them across engineering operations and the processor
Design reserve and settlement logic for a new merchant segment and implement it
Cut chargeback rate through better fraud tooling and merchant policy
Evaluate and onboard a new processor for local acquiring in Latin America or Asia
Build the payments monitoring layer so anomalies find us not the other way round
Ideal background:
A STEM or quantitative degree is strongly preferred - mathematics physics engineering computer science statistics econometrics or similar.
3 to 7 years in payment operations payment analytics or a data or analytics role that moved into payments at a processor acquirer or high-volume fintech (Adyen Stripe Nuvei Worldpay Revolut Wise Dojo Airwallex or similar)
Strong analytical skills advanced Excel or Sheets experience with BI tools and the ability to build models and run analyses independently without waiting for a data team.
Bonus: experience at platforms that act as the legal reseller (Global-e Digital River Paddle) local acquiring outside Europe and the US interchange and scheme fee economics or a background in data science or quantitative consulting before payments
Signals we care about:
Ridiculous bias for action. You solve you dont observe
Analytically strong and commercially sharp. You quantify the opportunity before you argue for it
Systems thinker who still does the work. You fix the transaction then remove the reason it broke
Strong EQ. Processors banks and merchants all need managing often at the same time
Exceptionally hard working. You see work as a core part of your purpose
Fluent in ambiguity and chaos. Startups are not neat this will be hard
Curious and resourceful. You can figure anything out
Clear quantified achievements on your CV not vague descriptions
What this role is not:
Not a payments strategy role without operational depth. Youll be in the dashboards daily
Not a pure analytics role. The analysis is the start the change is the job
Not a narrow specialist seat. Payments here touches pricing treasury tax and product
Not for someone who needs defined processes and hierarchy to be effective
Most companies treat payments as a cost centre someone else manages. Here it is the product and the margin at the same time.
We take legal responsibility for our merchants payments. That means a point of approval rate is real revenue for them and real evidence for us and a basis point of cost is real profit. Very few people get to own that surface this early with this much data and this little bureaucracy in the way.
We expect whoever is in this role to grow rapidly and well back you every step of the way.
Our team were leaders at Revolut Airwallex Adyen and Wayflyer and were backed by top-tier investors who have built or backed some of the worlds leading fintechs.
Equity and salary in a well-funded startup
Ability to own your work and move fast
World-class training from operators whove scaled globally
A global mission with real impact
Low politics high output
Chance to grow into a senior leadership role
A culture of builders not talkers
We work together in person in London 5 days a week. We believe the hardest problems are solved in the room.
Learn more
Outpost is where the hard problems are. If you want to help build the engine behind global trade wed love to hear from you.
Required Experience:
Manager
