Head of Payments

About the role

In this role, you will design and implement payment infrastructure from the ground up, focusing on high-risk verticals and subscription billing. You will build a multi-acquiring system and manage relationships with payment service providers to ensure optimal processing rates and fraud management.

You will collaborate with the product team to enhance user experience in payments and lead a growing payments team as the company expands into new verticals. Success will be measured by the efficiency of payment operations, approval rates, and overall impact on gross profit.

Skills that matter here

• Leadership in Payments: This role requires a strong background in leading payments teams and systems, particularly in high-risk environments.
• Payment Systems Design: Experience in building payment infrastructures is crucial for establishing the necessary frameworks for the new SaaS product.
• Recurring Payments Management: You will need to manage and optimize recurring billing processes, which are essential for subscription models.
• Fraud Management: Knowledge of chargeback management and fraud prevention is necessary to protect the business from financial losses.
• Payment Analytics: Building analytics to track payment performance metrics will be a key responsibility in this position.

Who this role suits

• Candidates should have a strong background in payments with leadership experience.
• Ideal individuals will possess a network of contacts among acquirers and PSPs in high-risk sectors.
• They should be analytical thinkers, capable of understanding the financial implications of payment systems.
• Proficiency in English for negotiations and communication with providers is essential.

From the employer

• Design and launch the payment infrastructure from scratch.
• Build multi-acquiring: a pool of acquirers, PSPs, and merchant accounts (MID) with redundancy.
• Select and configure a payment orchestrator: tokenization, routing, and cascading transactions, smart retries.
• Manage recurring billing: trial → subscription, upsells, dunning, account updater, inter-MID charges by token.
• Increase approval rates and reduce processing costs.
• Manage chargebacks and fraud: keep disputes within Visa and Mastercard limits, set up pre-dispute alerts (Ethoca, Verifi/RDR), anti-fraud, and representment.
• Onboard and maintain relationships with providers: KYB, terms, rolling reserves, payouts; minimize the risk of fund freezes.
• Work with the product team to make payments transparent for users: descriptors, notifications, easy cancellations.
• Build payment analytics: approval rate, CB ratio, refund rate, impact on gross profit and LTV.
• Form and lead the payments team as turnover grows and new verticals are entered.

• 4-5 years of experience in payments, with at least 2 years in a leadership role (Head / Lead of Payments).
• Real experience in high-risk or subscription B2C with high turnover.
• Experience launching payment systems from scratch and building multi-acquiring with dozens of MIDs.
• Deep knowledge of recurring payments: tokenization, MIT/CIT, retries, trial funnels.
• Experience with orchestrators (Primer, Spreedly, Akurateco, Corefy, or similar) and understanding their architecture.
• Knowledge of Visa and Mastercard rules regarding disputes and fraud, ability to remove accounts from monitoring programs.
• A personal network of contacts among acquirers and PSPs working with high-risk.
• Understanding of subscription unit economics and ability to calculate the impact of payments on LTV and margin.
• English proficiency for negotiations with providers.