Manager, Payment Operations

Circle (NYSE: CRCL) 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 the world's largest regulated stablecoin network anchored by USDC, Circle Payments Network for global money movement, and Arc, an enterprise-grade blockchain designed to become the Economic OS for the internet. Enterprises, financial institutions, and developers use Circle to power trusted, internet-scale financial innovation. Learn more at circle.com .
What you'll be part of:
Circle is committed to visibility and stability in everything we do. As we grow as an organization, we're expanding into some of the world's strongest jurisdictions. Speed and efficiency are motivators for our success and our employees live by our company values : High Integrity, Future Forward, Multistakeholder, Mindful, and Driven by Excellence. We have built a flexible work environment where new ideas are encouraged and everyone is a stakeholder.
What you'll be responsible for
You'll own the day-to-day Payment Operations function supporting Circle Payments Network, with accountability for operational coverage, queue performance, escalations, investigation quality, team capability, and process execution across a 24x7 environment. You'll develop analysts from onboarding through independent case ownership, maintain a high bar for operational quality, and ensure the team has the processes, training, documentation, and performance management needed to operate effectively. You'll also be the domain expert on the network and the senior operational escalation point for issues that cannot be resolved within the team.
What you'll work on

• Own shift design, rostering, coverage planning, and handoffs across a 24x7 model, including leave, surge and holiday planning, and the coverage math that sits behind 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 and work the hardest cases; you take what they cannot resolve and decide when an issue needs to leave the team and 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 be able to explain any 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'll bring to Circle
Core requirements

• 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 are still 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 math, 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.
• Comfortable working from data; you set targets, track them, and can defend the numbers.

What will make you stand out

• You have done this in a team that was being built, not one that was already running; you set the process rather than inheriting it.
• You have run an operation where the SLA mattered to a customer or partner, and you can describe what you changed to hit it.
• You have exposure to stablecoins, crypto rails, or digital assets, or clear evidence that you pick up new domains quickly.
• You actively use AI tooling in your own work and have a point of view on where it can-and cannot-improve operations.

Circle is on a mission to create an inclusive financial future, with transparency at our core. We consider a wide variety of elements when crafting our compensation ranges and total compensation packages.
Starting pay is determined by various factors, including but not limited to: relevant experience, skill set, qualifications, and other business and organizational needs. Please note that compensation ranges may differ for candidates in other locations.
We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status, or any other protected status required by the laws in the locations where we hire. Additionally, Circle participates in the E-Verify Program in certain locations, as required by law.
Should you require accommodations or assistance in our interview process because of a disability, please reach out to [email protected] for support. We respect your privacy and will connect with you separately from our interview process to accommodate your needs.