Payment Operations Lead

Outpost Technologies; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Outpost Technologies is seeking a Payment Operations Lead to own the money movement as we expand globally. You’ll work with engineering, merchants and treasury to optimize approval rates, routing, settlement and compliance across markets.

You’ll model costs, improve processor relations, and design scalable workflows that let us launch new markets quickly while maintaining governance and profitability.

Qualifications

• Candidate is data-driven and able to model payment economics.

Responsibilities

• Build payment operations workflows across markets.
• Monitor and improve approval rates by market, issuer, card type and processor.
• Design routing logic and escalation paths for declines and disputes.
• Own settlement, reconciliation and payout processes.

Skills

Data analysis

SQL

Payments knowledge

Stakeholder management

Tools

Processors

Treasury tools

Job description

Payment Operations Lead 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 merchant's 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.

The Role

We're 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 . You'll 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 you'll act on it, with processors, with engineering, and with merchants. You won't be siloed. Payments at Outpost touches pricing, treasury, tax and the product roadmap, and you'll 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. You'll work directly with the founding team and with engineering, who will build what you spec.

What You'll Get

Yes, the work is intense . But in return you'll get scope and exposure most people wait 10 to 20 years to access . You'll 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 won't handhold, but we'll coach you hard.

What You'll Do

• 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.
• You'll 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, you're 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

Example Projects

• 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 onb