Associate Director, Operations Strategy

ABOUT AIRWALLEX Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own. We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,700 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles https://www.airwallex.com/en-us/operating-principles to see it in full. HOW YOU'LL MAKE IMPACT Airwallex’s US Operations organization has expanded across Operations Strategy, Client Enablement, Onboarding Operations, Customer Support, and Financial Partnerships Operations. You’ll provide senior strategic and people leadership to scale the Americas operational backbone across financial operations, enterprise customer readiness, client enablement, and process improvement. - 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 operational onboarding issues that block revenue activation. - Build repeatable enterprise-readiness processes that coordinate go-live checklists, operational 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, including issues that require influence without direct authority. - Lead, coach, and develop an operations team by setting clear objectives, running performance calibrations, and building a culture of accountability and continuous improvement. You’ll work from our San Francisco office WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR ESSENTIALS - 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, with the ability to align Engineering, Product, Commercial, Partnerships, and other cross-functional teams around shared outcomes. - Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a data-driven approach to identifying root causes, measuring operational performance, and prioritizing improvements. - Excellent written and verbal communication and presentation skills, including the ability to synthesize complex operational issues and communicate them clearly to technical and executive audiences. - A self-directed approach to identifying and prioritizing opportunities, creating clarity in ambiguous environments, and delivering results independently. PREFERRED - Experience in payments, financial services, or financial infrastructure, with familiarity navigating payment rails, settlement flows, banking-partner relationships, and regulatory requirements. - A track record of building scalable operational processes from the ground up, including SOPs, automation workflows, and operational controls that reduce manual effort and improve quality at scale. - Experience establishing KPIs, SLAs, operational controls, or governance routines for payments or financial operations. - Hands-on experience with SQL or other data-querying tools for operational analysis. - Experience operating in environments with high standards, fast iteration cycles, and evolving priorities, with a bias toward action and continuous improvement. YOU'LL THRIVE HERE IF - You're comfortable with ambiguity. Give you a problem, not a prescription, and you'll run with it. - You own the outcome and you don't wait for permission to fix what's broken. - You connect dots across functions and hold the big picture without losing grip on the details. - You simplify complexity rather than hiding behind it. - You communicate clearly and directly across cultures, and you're thoughtful about how context shifts meaning across borders. LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR TEAM Operations at Airwallex is where global ambition gets translated into systems that actually hold at scale. This team runs the high-stakes flows businesses depend on — payments, accounts, and cross-border transactions. The work sits at the intersection of product, compliance, and customer experience. The problems are rarely simple: balancing speed with rigor, global consistency with local reality, and immediate execution with the stronger systems a growing company needs next. It's a function for operators with a builder mentality: trusted to take ownership, work cross-functionally with product and risk, and create new processes for things that have not existed before. If you want to help build the operational backbone of a global financial platform, this is work that keeps the whole machine moving. APPLICANT SAFETY POLICY: FRAUD AND THIRD-PARTY RECRUITERS To prote