Manager, Payment Operations

As Manager of Payment Operations at Circle, you own the day-to-day operations function supporting Circle Payments Network. You lead a team across a 24x7 environment, accountable for operational coverage, queue performance, escalations, investigation quality, team capability, and process execution. You develop analysts from onboarding through independent case ownership, maintain a high bar for operational quality, and serve as the domain expert and senior operational escalation point for issues the team cannot resolve.

What you'll do

• Own shift design, rostering, coverage planning, and handoffs across a 24x7 model, including leave, surge and holiday planning, and the coverage mathematics that supports it.
• Own live queue management, ensuring incoming partner queries and detected exceptions are picked up, triaged, worked, and closed within SLA.
• Own the escalation path. Senior Analysts are the first escalation point for the hardest cases; you take what they cannot resolve and decide when an issue needs to move to Engineering, Product, or partner-facing leadership.
• Build and run analyst onboarding, continuous training, certification, and competency development, using actual case output to identify individual gaps, build targeted improvement plans, and develop analysts from day one through independent handling of the full query mix.
• Establish and operate the QC program, including case sampling, review, calibration, error taxonomy, investigation standards, and feedback loops into training and SOPs.
• Own the operational metrics the function reports on, including Time to Acknowledge (TTA), Time to Resolve (TTR), SLA compliance, and volume and failure trends by shift, partner, and rail; produce the weekly operations readout and explain every number in it.
• Develop and maintain current, usable SOPs and runbooks that reflect how the team actually works; close gaps between practice and documentation, and run process changes through communication, training, adoption verification, and measurement.

What you bring

• 8+ years in payment operations, payment investigations, settlement operations, or a comparable operations function at a payments company, fintech, or bank.
• 2+ years directly managing a team of operations analysts as a Team Lead, Assistant Manager, or Manager, with real accountability for their output and not just work allocation; you remain hands-on and want to stay that way.
• Hands-on ownership of at least one full shift roster in a 24x7 or extended-coverage operation; you have built the roster, run the coverage mathematics, and handled the exceptions.
• Demonstrated ownership of training and ramp; you can name analysts you took from new to independent and describe how you developed them.
• Demonstrated ownership of process and documentation; you have written SOPs and runbooks that other people used, not just followed someone else's.
• Cross-border payments depth, including correspondent banking, SWIFT/MT103, local rails, reconciliation, exception handling, and settlement investigations.
• Comfort working from data; you set targets, track them, and can defend the numbers.

Nice to have

• Experience building a team and setting processes rather than inheriting an already-running operation.
• Experience running an operation where the SLA mattered to a customer or partner, and you can describe what you changed to hit it.
• Exposure to stablecoins, crypto rails, or digital assets, or clear evidence that you pick up new domains quickly.
• Active use of AI tooling in your own work and a point of view on where it can and cannot improve operations.

About Circle

Circle is one of the world's leading internet financial platform companies, building the foundation of a more open, global economy through digital assets, payment applications, and programmable blockchain infrastructure. Circle's platform includes USDC, the world's largest regulated stablecoin; Circle Payments Network for global money movement; and Arc, an enterprise-grade blockchain designed to become the Economic OS for the internet.