Lead, Payment Operations Strategy & Automation

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