Associate Director, Operations Strategy

About the role

Airwallex, the AI-native financial operating system used by more than 675,000 businesses, is hiring an Associate Director, Operations Strategy for its US Operations organization. The role provides senior strategic and people leadership to scale the Americas operational backbone across financial operations, enterprise customer readiness, client enablement and process improvement, working from the San Francisco office.

Key responsibilities

• Own financial operations workstreams across payment and deposit investigations, settlement exceptions, banking-partner escalations, recalls, wallet adjustments and transaction exception handling across Americas platforms.
• Drive client enablement by partnering with Commercial teams to configure customer accounts, enable products and capabilities, manage non-standard pricing and resolve onboarding issues that block revenue activation.
• Build repeatable enterprise-readiness processes covering go-live checklists, readiness reviews, support models, payment configuration, billing, pricing and post-sale handoffs.
• Improve operational performance by redesigning SOPs, increasing straight-through processing, strengthening incident and escalation frameworks, managing partner migrations and building operational controls.
• Align Product, Engineering, Financial Partnerships, Commercial, Customer Support, Solution Engineering and Onboarding Operations around shared outcomes, even when influence is needed without direct authority.
• Lead, coach and develop an operations team through clear objectives, performance calibrations and a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.

Required profile

• Eight or more years of experience in operations, strategy or program management within a fast-growing technology, fintech or payments company, or at a top-tier strategy or management consulting firm.
• At least two years of people management experience, with a demonstrated ability to build, lead and develop high-performing teams.
• Exceptional stakeholder management and influencing skills, able to align Engineering, Product, Commercial, Partnerships and other cross-functional teams.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a data-driven approach to root cause analysis and performance measurement.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, able to explain complex operational issues to technical and executive audiences.
• Preferred: experience in payments, financial services or financial infrastructure; building scalable operational processes such as SOPs, automation workflows and operational controls; establishing KPIs, SLAs, operational controls or governance routines; hands-on SQL or other data-querying tools; experience in fast-paced, high-standard environments.