Location
London or Berlin

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Competitive, commensurate with experience

About the Role
The Payments Program Manager is responsible for driving excellence across partner program management, international expansions, and payment partner onboarding. You will own end-to-end partner relationships and programs—identifying issues, driving resolution, spotting new opportunities, and advocating for improvements that enhance partner and customer experience. This role requires a hands-on approach: resolving operational escalations, gathering data, surfacing root causes, and leading cross-functional teams to sustainable solutions. You will also identify and capture new opportunities such as geographic expansions, new payment methods, or process improvements that unlock efficiency and scale.

Key responsibilities include:
- Owning day-to-day management of assigned payment partner programs as the primary operational contact
- Developing and maintaining partner governance frameworks including QBRs, scorecards, escalation paths, and performance tracking
- Monitoring partner health metrics and proactively driving performance improvements in collaboration with partners and internal stakeholders
- Managing cross-functional dependencies with Product, Technology, Legal, Finance, and Compliance teams to keep programs on track
- Identifying points of friction in payment acceptance and partner operations through data analysis and stakeholder engagement
- Resolving operational escalations end-to-end by gathering data, investigating root causes, coordinating remediation, and driving to closure
- Building business cases for improvements, setting requirements, and advocating for solutions with partner teams and internal leadership
- Producing clear, data-driven reporting on program status, risks, and escalations for senior stakeholders
- Leading onboarding of new international payment partners and payment methods from scoping through go-live, ensuring delivery against milestones and SLAs
- Driving geographic and product expansion programs, coordinating technical integrations and commercial readiness across markets
- Identifying and pursuing new opportunities to improve payment acceptance, reduce cost, and enhance customer experience
- Building and improving scalable processes for partner lifecycle management from initial assessment through steady-state operations

Experience
- Working cross-functionally with technical and non-technical teams
- Defining program requirements and using data and metrics to drive improvements
- Program or project management
- Implementing repeatable processes and driving automation or standardization
- Managing external partner or vendor relationships
- Payments industry experience preferred

About You
- Strong analytical skills with the ability to identify operational inefficiencies and lead process improvements
- Experience driving medium to large projects to completion
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including writing clear documentation such as business reviews and post-mortems
- Ability to own program strategy, end-to-end delivery, and communicate results to senior leadership

Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree or above required
- Master's degree or MBA in business, operations, or related field preferred