Payments Operations Lead

Senior Payments Operations Lead

Location: Remote Employment: Full-time Level: Senior individual contributor Preferred geography: Ukraine or Eastern Europe

About the role

MCR Group builds and scales subscription-based digital products across international markets. Since launch, the company has grown 20x, and we are now building the payments infrastructure needed for our next stage of growth.

We are looking for a Senior Payments Operations Lead to own and develop our payment operations function. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role for someone who combines deep subscription-payments expertise with strong analytical, commercial, and operational skills.

You will have two core missions:

1. Build our multi-PSP infrastructure: identify, negotiate with, onboard, and connect the right Payment Service Providers.
2. Own ongoing payment performance: analyze transactions, identify problems and opportunities, and improve approval rates, renewal performance, and revenue recovery.

This is a greenfield opportunity. You will not inherit a mature payments organization or a fixed operating model. You will have the freedom and responsibility to build the function using your experience, judgment, and vision.

What you will own

Payment infrastructure and PSP strategy

• Assess the current payment setup and define the future multi-PSP strategy.
• Identify and evaluate new PSPs, acquirers, and payment partners.
• Lead commercial negotiations, onboarding, contracting, and escalation processes.
• Build a resilient multi-provider setup that reduces concentration and operational risk.
• Design and implement payment orchestration, routing, cascading, and failover logic.
• Work with legal, finance, product, and engineering teams throughout PSP integrations.
• Establish a structured approach to PSP performance reviews and relationship management.

The initial infrastructure-building phase is expected to be especially intensive during the first six months. Once the core setup is established, the focus will shift toward continuous optimization and maintenance.

Payment performance and daily operations

• Monitor payment performance across all PSPs, products, countries, and transaction types.
• Analyze authorization rates, decline rates, decline reasons, renewal sequences, and payment failures.
• Identify performance issues and revenue opportunities through daily analysis.
• Define retry, cascading, routing, and dunning strategies.
• Improve failed-payment recovery and reduce involuntary churn.
• Build or request the reports needed to make informed operational decisions.
• Create dashboards, alerts, and monitoring processes that identify payment issues before they materially affect revenue.
• Investigate changes in performance and coordinate corrective actions with internal teams and external providers.

As additional PSPs are connected, the analytical and operational complexity of the role will grow. Strong attention to detail and comfort working with numbers every day are essential.

Risk, disputes, and process ownership

• Build and manage the operational framework for disputes, refunds, chargebacks, and fraud monitoring.
• Analyze related reports, trends, ratios, and root causes.
• Define responsibilities, workflows, escalation paths, and internal controls.
• Maintain compliance with PSP risk programs and relevant card-scheme requirements.
• Partner with the team member responsible for processing individual refunds and chargebacks.

You will not be expected to handle every individual refund or dispute personally. Your responsibility will be to understand these processes deeply, build the right structure, monitor results, and ensure the function operates effectively.

What we are looking for

Essential experience

• At least five years of relevant experience in payment operations, payment performance, acquiring, or subscription billing.
• Direct experience working with multiple PSPs, such as Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, Checkout.com, or comparable providers.
• Proven experience evaluating and onboarding PSPs and managing multi-provider payment setups.
• Experience building or operating payment orchestration, routing, and cascading systems.
• Strong experience with recurring subscriptions, renewals, retries, dunning, and involuntary-churn reduction.
• Experience managing more than $12 million in payment volume.
• Strong knowledge of payment metrics, including authorization rates, decline reasons, recovery rates, dispute ratios, and fraud ratios.
• Deep understanding of refunds, disputes, chargebacks, fraud monitoring, and card-scheme requirements.
• Strong analytical skills and the ability to translate payment data into clear priorities and actions.
• Experience building reporting, dashboards, and operational monitoring from the ground up.
• Confidence working directly with senior executives, technical teams, legal partners, and external payment providers.
• Strong English communication and negotiation skills.

Particularly relevant backgrounds

We are especially interested in candidates from high-volume, international subscription businesses, consumer applications, digital products, SaaS, streaming, or comparable recurring-revenue environments.

Experience limited to one-time payments or sectors with fundamentally different PSP-rotation models may be less relevant unless accompanied by substantial subscription-payment expertise.

What success looks like

During your first six months, you will be expected to:

• Build a clear understanding of our payment flows, performance, risks, and reporting gaps.
• Define the target PSP and payment-orchestration strategy.
• Establish reliable payment-performance reporting and operational alerts.
• Lead the evaluation, negotiation, and onboarding of additional PSPs.
• Create structured processes for payment incidents, disputes, fraud, and PSP escalations.
• Identify and begin implementing opportunities to improve authorization and renewal performance.

Over time, success will be measured through:

• Stronger approval and renewal rates.
• Higher failed-payment recovery.
• Lower involuntary churn.
• Greater PSP resilience and lower concentration risk.
• Healthy fraud and dispute ratios.
• Reliable reporting and faster incident detection.
• Sustainable payment infrastructure that supports new products and markets.

Specific targets will be agreed based on current performance baselines.

Reporting and collaboration

You will have one administrative manager responsible for performance reviews, goal-setting, and day-to-day organizational support.

Functionally, you will work closely with:

• The CEO on payment strategy and business priorities.
• The CFO on financial performance, risk, and commercial matters.
• The founders on major payment-infrastructure decisions.
• Product and engineering on integrations and payment-flow improvements.
• Legal and operational colleagues on contracts, compliance, disputes, refunds, and fraud processes.

Because this is a new position, the final organizational structure may evolve as the function develops.

Why join us

• Build a critical payment function from the ground up.
• Define the infrastructure based on your own knowledge and vision.
• Work on an international subscription business that has grown 20x.
• Support new products and expansion into new markets.
• Own decisions with direct impact on revenue, retention, and business resilience.
• Work directly with the founders on a strategic company priority.
• Receive highly competitive compensation based on your experience, impact, and fit.
• Work remotely with a fast-moving, predominantly Ukrainian team.