Payments Ops Manager — Lead & Compliance

Provyne; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 146,000 - 191,000; Full time

Job summary

Gusto is hiring a Payment Operations Manager to lead a team responsible for end-to-end payment rails, including ACH, wires, RTP, and international payments. You will own escalation handling, partner relationships, and the compliance programs that keep payments running smoothly.

You will work closely with Engineering, Product, Accounting, Risk, Legal, and CX to balance execution with governance, while guiding a high-performing team and driving improvements across processes and controls.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of hands-on experience in payment operations, banking operations, or treasury operations, including direct ownership of escalations, partner issues, or ticket queues, and 2+ years directly managing a team.
• Deep working knowledge of domestic payment rails (ACH/Nacha, wires, RTP) and experience with international money movement is a strong plus.
• Experience managing the operational side of a bank or payment partner relationship, including escalations, issue triage, and partner reviews.
• Track record of operating within a compliance program (Nacha Risk Self-Assessment, SOC 1, unclaimed property, or similar), including audits and controls work.
• Strong people leadership: you've hired, coached, and managed performance for a team of analysts or similar operational ICs.
• Comfortable operating with real ambiguity and driving cross-functional work without needing a fully defined process.
• AI-fluent: you use it as a genuine lever for yourself and expect your team to as well.
• Nacha AAP or AFPP certification is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the team.
• Manage a team of Payment Operations Analysts. Hire, coach, and develop them, set clear expectations, and give direct feedback.
• Own team-level SLAs, on-call rotation and escalation paths, and reporting, and use data to spot where the team's processes are breaking down and fix the root cause, not just the symptom.
• You're accountable for the team's output and for the growth of the people on it.
• Manage day-to-day bank and payment partner operations. Own the operational relationship with our banking and payment partners, including issue triage, escalations, and operational reviews, and personally work individual tickets yourself when the queue backs up or SLAs are at risk.
• Partner closely with the team that owns the strategic partnership on renewals and due diligence.
• Operate the compliance programs that keep payments running. Execute the day-to-day work behind Gusto's Nacha, unclaimed property, and bank compliance programs, and Payment Ops' portion of SOC 1 audits.
• Financial Services Compliance and Payroll Compliance own these programs; you're the operational partner who keeps documentation, controls, and evidence current and coordinates with them and GRC when new requirements land.
• Drive incident response for payment operations. When something breaks at scale, you're in the investigation yourself and drive retro to prevent recurrence.
• Partner with Product and Engineering. Bring operational insight into product and engineering discussions and ensure operational needs are represented.
• Lead with AI Model and encourage the use of AI across the team.

Skills

Payment operations

Team leadership

Banking operations

Compliance programs

AI fluency

Cross-functional collaboration

Escalation management

Operational ownership

Job description

Gusto is hiring a Payment Operations Manager to lead a team responsible for end-to-end payment rails, including ACH, wires, RTP, and international payments. You will own escalation handling, partner relationships, and the compliance programs that keep payments running smoothly.

You will work closely with Engineering, Product, Accounting, Risk, Legal, and CX to balance execution with governance, while guiding a high-performing team and driving improvements across processes and controls.