Founding Ops Lead – Regulated FinTech Payments Infrastructure

Urban Digital Recruitment Ltd; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 90,000 - 99,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Urban Digital Recruitment Ltd partners with a Europe-based early-stage fintech building regulated payments infrastructure. The Founding Operations Lead will write SOPs, design workflows, and own cross-functional onboarding, compliance, and product operations in a flat founder-led team.

You will bring hands-on EU payments experience (SEPA, SWIFT) and a track record of building operations from scratch in Seed or pre-Series A stages.

Qualifications

• Hands-on EU payments experience (SEPA, SWIFT) and cross-border settlement.
• Experience building operational workflows, SOPs and policies from zero.
• Experience in very early-stage fintechs (Seed or pre-Series A).
• Comfort in a founder-led, flat team with high ambiguity.

Responsibilities

• Define operational architecture across onboarding, payments, settlement and reconciliation.
• Write the first SOPs, policies and operations manual from a blank page - then adapting them to specific customer needs in practice
• KYB/KYC and onboarding workflows that reduce friction while maintaining robust controls
• Transaction monitoring, operational risk controls and compliance process design
• Efficiency and automation improvements across compliance and product operations
• Customer service standards, escalation frameworks and response procedures
• Roles, permissions and workflow design across a multi-entity, multi-licence structure
• Translating regulatory requirements (EMI, FCA, MiCA) into practical operational infrastructure
• Cross-functional alignment across Compliance, Product, Technology and Commercial teams
• Supporting early operational hiring as the team grows

Skills

EU payments

SEPA

SWIFT

Build from scratch

Founder-led

Job description

Founding Operations Lead – Regulated FinTech Payments Infrastructure

UK / Ireland / Netherlands = REMOTE

c.€110k + Equity

The opportunity

I'm proud to be partnering with one of Europe's most interesting early-stage fintechs - building regulated financial infrastructure that enables money to move seamlessly between traditional banking systems and blockchain networks.

The platform sits at the intersection of regulated banking and digital assets, combining programmable payment infrastructure, multi-currency IBANs, stablecoin wallets and cross-border settlement into a single ecosystem. The business holds a rare European licence in the digital assets space and is one of a very small number of companies operating at this intersection in a fully regulated capacity.

Backed by institutional investment and operating across multiple jurisdictions, the business is founder-led, fast-moving and entering a critical stage of growth. They are now hiring their first Operations Lead.

What this role actually is

This is not an Operations Manager role focused on running and maintaining processes that already exist.

This is a 0→1 build role.

The business needs someone who has joined a company before the operational infrastructure existed - who has written the first SOPs and policies, designed the first workflows, figured out what needed to be built, built it, and then adapted it when reality met the first real customers. If your career has been spent optimising and scaling within established, mature operational functions, this is probably not the right fit.

If, on the other hand, you have been the person who built the operational foundation of a scaling fintech from scratch - ideally at Seed or pre-Series A stage - and you are comfortable doing that inside a small, flat, founder-led team with very little hierarchy, this could be a strong match.

The role spans payments operations, onboarding, customer lifecycle, compliance workflows and product-adjacent process improvement across multiple entities within a multi-licence, multi-jurisdiction structure. You will sit at the centre of Operations, Compliance, Product and Commercial - helping turn a licensed platform into a scalable, revenue-generating infrastructure business.

What you'll own

• Operational architecture across onboarding, payments, settlement and reconciliation
• Writing the first SOPs, policies and operations manual from a blank page - then adapting them to specific customer needs in practice
• KYB/KYC and onboarding workflows that reduce friction while maintaining robust controls
• Transaction monitoring, operational risk controls and compliance process design
• Efficiency and automation improvements across compliance and product operations
• Customer service standards, escalation frameworks and response procedures
• Roles, permissions and workflow design across a multi-entity, multi-licence structure
• Translating regulatory requirements (EMI, FCA, MiCA) into practical operational infrastructure
• Cross-functional alignment across Compliance, Product, Technology and Commercial teams
• Supporting early operational hiring as the team grows

What we're looking for

You are likely from a payments, fintech or EMI background - with direct, hands-on EU payments experience (SEPA, SWIFT, cross-border settlement) and demonstrable evidence of building operational infrastructure from scratch, not inheriting it.

Third-party or adjacent payments exposure is not sufficient for this role.

You have done this inside a small, founder-led business - ideally at Seed or pre-Series A stage - where the pace is high, the structure is flat and the expectation is that you figure things out.

Series B experience alone is not sufficient evidence of the ability to build from scratch.

We are deliberately looking for someone slightly more junior to mid-level but recently hands-on. Senior profiles who have moved away from day-to-day delivery are unlikely to be the right fit.

Strongly aligned candidates will have:

• Direct, hands-on EU payments experience - SEPA, SWIFT, cross-border settlement - personally owned and operated
• Experience within EMI, FCA or MiCA-regulated environments
• A track record of building operational workflows, SOPs and policies from zero - not improving existing ones - and adapting them once live
• Experience from a very early-stage business (Seed or pre-Series A strongly preferred)
• Strong understanding of onboarding, KYC/KYB, customer lifecycle and process design
• Comfort working across compliance, product, operations and customer-facing functions simultaneously
• Experience in a founder-led environment where breadth, ownership and ambiguity are the norm
• Crypto, stablecoin or fiat-to-crypto exposure (advantageous but not essential)

You’ll thrive here if you:

• Have been the person who built the function, not the person who ran it
• Are naturally structured and systematic - but comfortable when the structure doesn't exist yet
• Communicate with humility and bring people with you rather than working around them
• Can move between strategy and execution without needing to be told which is required
• Want significant ownership and direct founder exposure
• Are energised by building something rather than managing what is already built

Why join

This is a foundational hire at a pivotal stage of growth - with direct exposure to the founders, meaningful equity, genuine scope to grow into broader leadership as the business scales, and the chance to shape how an ambitious, globally positioned fintech operates from the inside.

If you are the person who builds the infrastructure others later run, we would love to hear from you.