Quality Assurance Team Lead - Payment Operations

Job description

Join Wise’s Quality Assurance team and help us build world-class, scalable operations that keep customers safe and deliver great experiences. In this role, you’ll provide independent, expert assurance over how work is done—spotting risk, identifying control gaps, and turning insights into clear, practical improvements. You’ll balance attention to detail with strong judgement, using data and tools to form well-reasoned conclusions that stand up to scrutiny.

You’ll work closely with partners across the business, sharing themes and trends, contributing to consistent decision-making, and helping raise the bar on quality—while keeping pace in a fast-moving environment aligned to our mission of Money Without Borders. Candidates with experience in the Payments domain and a strong, end-to-end understanding of how money moves through a modern payments business.

Pay-In & Pay-Out

Deep familiarity with how customer funds are received, processed, and disbursed across multiple payment methods and rails.

Reconciliation & Settlement

Solid grasp of how transactions are matched, balanced, and settled between internal systems, banking partners, and payment schemes.

Exception Handling & Operational Excellence

Ability to diagnose and resolve payment issues — failures, returns, refunds, chargebacks — while balancing speed, accuracy, and customer experience.

Key Responsibilities

Leadership : Lead by example and drive a customer focused and proactive risk & compliance management mindset across your team and the wider organization. Promote a culture of ownership and accountability. Build high-performing teams that value knowledge sharing and continuous learning.

People management

Coach and develop a strong and competent QA team. Conduct regular one on one coaching sessions and performance reviews. Deliver initiatives to help your team to grow their skills, behaviours, and competencies. Design and manage plans to support development. Conduct regular check-ins and make robust recommendations to support Wise performance management activities.

Operational management

Be accountable for your area of operations. Identify, propose and drive opportunities for improvements. Collaborate with central functions and other teams as needed to increase automation and operational efficiency. Monitor team resource allocation and refine standard operating procedures to scale and deliver quality QA that stakeholders can trust and rely on. Take a proactive approach to consistently achieving individual and team targets (KPIs, SLAs), demonstrating a strong commitment to both quality and speed.

Meet deadlines, optimise processing times and take full ownership and accountability to deliver results. Ensure effective communication and escalation of blockers impacting delivery of the QA outcomes supported with actions that are being taken or required.

Performance management

Be fully responsible for performance of your area of operations. Drive the initiatives, KPIs and OKRs of your area in line with the organisation’s strategic vision. Ensure that your team has appropriate plans in place to meet performance and quality targets. Create comprehensive plans for developing future leaders. Provide regular coaching and work with your direct reports to inspire them and develop their skills. Be an advocate for the company values, our long term strategic goals and promote them across the organization.

Technical Excellence

Take responsibility for the accuracy and validity of the QA outcomes of the domain (Payment Defect and Exception Handling), applying your subject matter expertise to calibrate on QA outcomes, leading Root Cause Analysis at the QA domain level inclusive of performing RCA on more complex subjects, engaging the RCA team for support where necessary.

Stakeholders management & communication

Collaborate closely with your stakeholders and communicate complex topics in an easy to understand and engaging way. Translate aggregated QA data into a compelling narrative, presenting actionable insights to stakeholders and hold stakeholders accountable for owning and implementing actions. Communicate confidently with difficult stakeholders. Proactively work on improving cross-team communication, acting as the liaison between different parts of the organization and your own team.

Expertise sharing

Be a subject matter expert in your area with the ability to train and coach your team on relevant QA, policy and risk topics. Stay up to date and maintain a strong understanding of our regulatory obligations, internal policies, and applying a risk-based approach to exception handling and quality assessment in the Payment domain.. Able to assist senior leadership with audits and developing our policies and processes

Qualifications

Required

Professional experience: 3+ years proven experience in leading, coaching, and managing the performance of a technical or analytical team (5 to 20 employees) in a relevant QA domain, driving operational excellence. Fluent in English (written and verbal skills) with the ability to clearly articulate your thoughts and recommendations.

Delivery

Proven project management skills to deliver a portfolio of projects and reviews on time and to a high standard. Ability to analyse and drive action to improve the team's metrics.

Self-development

Is committed to continuing to learn and develop leadership skills and deep expertise through industry and trend analysis, regulatory insights, and emerging risk typologies.

Functional skills

Risk & Compliance expertise: Ability to review and interpret policy to support and coach the team to deliver consistent and correct outcomes. Be the escalation point and sign-off final decisions on complex issues, providing robust risk-based rationale.

Quality Assurance framework

Ensures the Quality Assurance approach for your given area remains adequate and effective through business change, and to ensure QA delivers consistent and correct outcomes that stakeholders can trust and rely on.

Trend Analysis

Use data and insights to assess key issues, trends and root causes. Communicates actionable insights to stakeholders to influence and drive positive change, including gaps in policies and processes where relevant. Drives continuous improvement at team and organizational level.

Future Ready Technology Leadership

Develops a culture of AI literacy, encouraging experimentation and efficient use of available tools. Identifies and tests strategic opportunities for automation and AI within the QA process.

Values & Behaviors Risk & Compliance Management

Inspires, leads and role models expected behaviors, fosters a culture of accountability, curiosity, risk management and continuous improvement.

Communication and Influence

Ability to clearly articulate risk, materiality and impacts. Presents clear and concise QA outcomes to senior leaders, summarizing key risks and issues, and influences risk-based, proportionate actions.

Process improvement

Challenges ways of working, critically assesses data and drives continuous improvement, using data to track impacts and benefits.

Organizational skills

Strong organizational skills and time management, and ability to deliver KPIs in a fast paced and high pressure environment.

Proactiveness

Punctual, independent, proactive and willing to get things done. You have a proven track record of taking individual ownership and responsibilities as well as being a great team-player. Why should you join? If you’re excited to sharpen your quality assurance and risk-assessment skills while making a direct, visible impact on how Wise serves customers, this Quality Assurance Specialist role is a great fit. With a focus on delivering objective, risk-based reviews and actionable insights, you’ll work closely with a range of stakeholders across operations and control functions, contribute to consistent decision-making through calibration and best-practice sharing, and help drive improvements by identifying themes, root causes, and opportunities to strengthen our processes—supporting Wise’s mission of Money Without Borders.