Payments Optimization Consultant

Airwallex; City of Westminster; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Airwallex is hiring a Merchant Payments Senior Specialist to identify and drive opportunities to improve payment performance for enterprise merchants. You will analyse merchant data, transactions, and benchmarks to shape optimisation strategies, working with Product, Engineering, and Data Science to implement AI-powered approaches.

You will empower Sales and Account Management with practical insights and develop playbooks that translate complex analysis into clear, actionable recommendations for

Responsibilities

• Identify opportunities to improve payment performance through merchant data, transaction trends, and industry benchmarks.
• Lead deep-dive conversations with enterprise merchants about payment performance.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Data Science to develop optimisation levers.
• Translate merchant feedback into product roadmap recommendations.
• Enable Sales and Account Management with practical payment optimisation knowledge.
• Build relationships with card issuers and payment networks to improve the end-to-end payment experience.

Job description

Responsibilities

• You’ll identify high-impact opportunities to improve payment performance by analysing merchant data, transaction trends, and industry benchmarks.
• Identify opportunities to improve payment performance through merchant data, transaction trends, and industry benchmarks.
• Build and refine payment optimisation methodologies and playbooks that help Airwallex stay ahead of industry developments.
• Lead deep-dive conversations with enterprise merchants about payment performance, acting as a trusted strategic advisor to improve transaction outcomes.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Data Science to develop optimisation levers, including AI- and machine-learning-powered approaches to smart routing, cost reduction, and payment success.
• Translate merchant feedback and frontline insights into product roadmap recommendations.
• Enable Sales and Account Management teams with practical payment optimisation knowledge, tools, and training.
• Build relationships with external stakeholders, including card issuers and payment networks, to improve the end-to-end payment experience. 5+ years of experience in payments, with strong knowledge of e-commerce, card-based processing, and payment optimisation.
• Strong understanding of card network rules, local payment methods, and regulatory requirements such as PSD2 and PSD3.
• Strong analytical skills and experience using data and business intelligence tools to identify opportunities and explain performance trends.
• Experience turning complex analysis into clear recommendations for both technical and commercial audiences.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with confidence engaging enterprise clients and senior stakeholders.
• Experience working cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Sales, and Account Management teams.
• A self-directed approach and the ability to make progress in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
• Intellectual curiosity and a practical approach to solving complex customer and payment problems.

Preferred

• Experience with BI and data platforms such as Looker, Power BI, Tableau, or Databricks.
• Experience working with payment optimisation, smart routing, fraud mitigation, or transaction success-rate improvement.
• Experience engaging directly with card issuers, payment networks, or other global payments stakeholders.
• Experience creating standardised methodologies, playbooks, or enablement programmes for commercial teams.

You’ll thrive here

• You're comfortable owning the roadmap yourself.
• You own the outcome and you don't wait for permission to fix what's broken.
• You're comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly anyway.
• You connect dots across functions and hold the big picture without losing grip on the details.
• You say what you mean. You're direct, but you lead with respect.

Company Overview

Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own.

We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,700 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles to see it in full.

Merchant Services

Merchant Services at Airwallex is made up of two teams: Solutions Engineering and Technical Support, working together to turn customer-facing technical work into product progress. Across both teams, we help businesses design, integrate, launch, optimize, and scale on Airwallex's global financial infrastructure, covering solution architecture, delivery, technical account management, optimisation, and support. The mandate is simple: solve for the customer in front of us, and build for the customers we haven't met yet. Sitting close to Product, Engineering, and Design means the patterns you see in real customer integrations can become better APIs, documentation, tooling, onboarding paths, and product capabilities. The hard part is doing both at once: shipping for today's customer without losing the signal that improves the product for the next. This is a team for people who can earn trust with builders, reason through complex systems, communicate clearly, and stay grounded in commercial outcomes. If you want to work at the intersection of agentic finance, customer impact, and product development, this is where your work compounds.