Payment Operations Manager

Role Overview

• Own end-to-end reconciliation across all Astra rails: Visa Direct, Mastercard Move, RTP, FedNow, ACH, and stablecoin
• Build and maintain daily/intraday settlement processes that catch breaks early and resolve them fast
• Partner with Engineering to automate reconciliation pipelines -
• reducing manual toil, not just documenting it
• Establish clear exception workflows: categorize, route, escalate, and close breaks within defined SLAs
• Own the source-of-truth ledger that Finance, Product, and Banking partners can rely on
• Design and operate the monitoring layer for transaction health: success rates, latency, return codes, and anomalies by rail
• Build alerting that surfaces edge cases -
• stuck transactions, unexpected return codes, settlement gaps -
• before clients feel them
• Partner closely with Engineering to instrument observability, write runbooks, and build self-healing automation where it makes sense
• Own post-mortems on operational failures: root cause, remediation, and preventing recurrence
• Track and report on operational KPIs weekly: settlement break rates, dispute win rates, mean time to resolve
• Own the full dispute lifecycle across card network and ACH rails: intake, evidence compilation, submission, and outcome tracking
• Build and maintain a dispute calendar that ensures no response deadline is missed across Visa, Mastercard, and NACHA
• Manage the evidence workflow in coordination with clients and the Customer Success team
• Track dispute rates by client, rail, and transaction type -
• and surface patterns that indicate upstream product or onboarding issues
• Serve as the day-to-day operational contact for Astra's banking partners across settlement, funding, and exception handling
• Own the operational relationship with card networks (Visa Direct, Mastercard Move) and RTP/FedNow operators
• Coordinate with Compliance on NACHA rule adherence, return rate thresholds, and network reporting requirements
• Surface partner-level issues -
• degraded rails, delayed settlements, network outages -
• and manage communications internally

Requirements

• 5+ years in payment operations, fintech operations, or financial partner operations at a payments infrastructure company, bank, or processor
• Deep fluency in multi-rail money movement: ACH, RTP/FedNow, card push (Visa Direct / Mastercard Move), and ideally stablecoin rails
• Hands-on reconciliation experience -
• not just process ownership, but the ability to get into data, write queries, and build the tooling
• Proven dispute and chargeback management background, including working knowledge of Visa and Mastercard dispute rules and NACHA return code frameworks
• Technically fluent: comfortable working with engineers, reading API logs, and shaping monitoring requirements -
• you don't need to code, but you speak the language
• Operator's mentality: you build processes, not decks. You close loops. You own outcomes
• Experience in an early-to-mid-stage company where you have had to build from scratch, not just maintain what exists

Tech Stack

• Ruby on Rails

Benefits

• Competitive compensation with equity in a growing fintech company.
• Remote-first culture with flexible working arrangements
• Small team, big impact — your work directly supports Astra’s ability to scale responsibly
• Professional growth opportunities in compliance and risk management
• Mission-driven — build infrastructure that powers financial innovation while meeting the highest regulatory standards