Lead, Payment Operations Strategy & Automation

Company Description

Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world's money.

Min fees. Max ease. Full speed.

• Whether people and businesses are sending money to another country, spending abroad, or making and receiving international payments, Wise is on a mission to make their lives easier and save them money.
• As part of our team, you will be helping us create an entirely new network for the world's money.
• For everyone, everywhere.
• More about our mission and what we offer .

Job Description

We're hiring someone to lead the operational side of how Wise handles payments that don't complete cleanly and to help redesign that operation for a world where AI agents do most of the work.

Why this role exists

Wise moves money across borders for millions of customers globally. Most payments go through cleanly. Some don't — they get delayed, returned, misrouted, or need a human to step in. Those payments are handled by the Payment Operations function.

Wise is on a long-term growth trajectory, and operational handling needs to scale in a way that doesn't just track volume linearly.

So we've made a deliberate bet: over the next three years, we're rebuilding Payment Operations into a hybrid human + AI operating model — where AI agents execute the majority of frontline work, and humans move from handlers to designers, monitors, and escalators of agent-driven systems.

That's the shift you'd lead.

The role

You'd own Central Payment Operations at the function level: a team of Product Specialists and Technical Leads embedded alongside our Payment Defects & Incidents product-engineering squad. Together, you and the product-engineering squad share one roadmap, one vision, and one mission.

Concretely, you'd:

• Own the outcome. Move our core operational metrics — cost, first-resolution rate, defect rate, operational loss — at scale.
• Co-shape the roadmap with the Product Manager and Engineering Lead. You're the operations voice in every strategy conversation, and the technical/product voice back into operations.
• Design the AI transition. Ship AI-assisted workflows in production. Define and build the evaluation and observability foundations. Prove the design patterns that scale.
• Build the leadership bench. Grow the senior individual contributors and Technical Leads reporting to you into future leaders.
• Represent the function in Risk, Compliance, Analytics, Workforce Management, Quality, Training, Internal Audit, and PayOps leadership forums.

• This role reports to the Head of Central Payment Operations.
• What the first 6 months look like

• Month 1–2: Land. Meet the team, product-engineering partners, and cross-functional stakeholders. Understand the current operational landscape and the shape of the biggest cost drivers.
• Month 2–4: Co-shape the next roadmap cycle. Ship the first AI-assisted workflow in production. Stand up the eval framework.
• Month 4–6: Deliver measurable improvement against the operating-model targets. Establish the operating rhythm for how the team and its product-engineering partners work together.

What we can offer

• A real mandate. This isn't a role where you inherit a system and maintain it. You'll shape how Wise handles payment operations at scale for the next chapter of the company.
• A team that already partners deeply with product and engineering. You don't have to build that from scratch.
• A leader who's done the job. You get a manager who understands the terrain, not someone who'll ask you to explain it.
• Real career pathways. PayOps leadership, business operations across servicing, product/analytics, or leading agentic-ops functions.

Qualifications

Must have:

• 6+ years in operations, product-ops, or product roles at fintech / payments / high-growth tech — with clear ownership of a domain end-to-end (problem → design → shipped outcome → measurable impact)
• Direct experience partnering with a Product Manager and Engineering Lead to co-shape a roadmap
• Hands-on experience with at least one shipped AI, agent, or LLM-driven workflow in an operational or product context
• SQL literacy and code literacy: comfortable using AI tools to move fast on data and code, and knowing enough to validate what they produce
• A working understanding of software development principles — enough to size effort vs impact and challenge engineers on trade-offs
• Executive presence: comfortable presenting to and pushing back in senior operations, product, and engineering forums
• Coaching instinct — you've grown senior individual contributors into future leaders, not just managed them
• Storytelling: you can turn a technical/operational reality into a strategic narrative that lands with non-technical audiences

Nice to have

• Payments, banking, or regulated financial services background
• Experience taking organisations through an operating-model transition
• Experience defining eval frameworks, observability, or human-in-the-loop design for AI/agent systems
• Familiarity with modern AI tooling — LLM APIs, agent frameworks, prompt/eval design

What we're not looking for:

• Project or Program Managers — this role owns outcomes , not delivery coordination
• Business Intelligence or Data Analysts — SQL fluency matters, but this isn't a reporting role
• Career people-managers with no IC depth in the last 3–5 years — you have to be credible with engineers and with ops
• Consultants or strategists without shipped outcomes — we need a builder
• Ops leaders whose track record is scaling headcount — our thesis is different
• AI skeptics — low conviction on AI is a hard no for this role

Additional Information

For everyone, everywhere. We're people building money without borders — without judgement or prejudice, too. We believe teams are strongest when they are diverse, equitable and inclusive.

• We're proud to have a truly international team, and we celebrate our differences.
• Inclusive teams help us live our values and make sure every Wiser feels respected, empowered to contribute towards our mission and able to progress in their careers.
• If you want to find out more about what it's like to work at Wise visit Wise.Jobs .
• Keep up to date with life at Wise by following us on LinkedIn and Instagram .