Payments and Operations Platform Lead

Key Responsibilities

• Platform Ownership & Strategy
• Own the product vision and roadmap for the payments and childcare management platform, aligning investments to business priorities, growth initiatives, and customer experience outcomes.
• Serve as the Product Owner for payment processing, childcare management platform, and third-party payment capabilities, balancing enhancements, risk reduction, and technical debt.
• Define and prioritize the product backlog, partnering with Finance, Operations, IT, and vendors to sequence features, enhancements, and regulatory needs.
• Establish and track product success metrics (e.g., payment success rates, settlement timeliness, reconciliation accuracy, exception volume, cost-to-collect).
• Partner with Finance to ensure the platform supports revenue assurance, cash-flow optimization, audit readiness, and financial transparency.
• Lead product planning for scalability and expansion, supporting enrollment growth, acquisitions, new business models, and emerging payment methods.
• Technical Leadership
• Translate business and operational needs into clear product requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria across the childcare management lifecycle.
• Guide solution design by collaborating with architecture, engineering, and vendors to ensure solutions are scalable, secure, and fit-for-purpose.
• Lead the technical configuration and architecture of payment and childcare management platforms.
• Design and implement system workflows, transaction rules, and configuration changes following best practices and PCI-DSS compliance requirements.
• Oversee integrations between childcare management system, payment systems, third-party payment portals, and other enterprise systems (ERP, billing, enrollment).
• Ensure data integrity, security, and compliance with internal IT policies, PCI standards, and applicable financial and government program regulations.
• Serve as the payments security and risk owner, accountable for PCI-DSS scope management, annual assessments, penetration testing coordination, and remediation planning.
• Lead architecture decisions related to tokenization, encryption, payment vaults, and secure card-on-file strategies.
• Partner with Security, Risk, and Internal Audit to support SOX controls, external audits, and regulatory reviews tied to payments and third-party funding.
• Evaluate, design, and implement resiliency, redundancy, and disaster recovery strategies for all payment-critical systems.
• Operational Excellence
• Monitor system performance and proactively address issues, risks, and payment processing failures.
• Manage and prioritize incoming requests, enhancements, and break/fix work across the payments ecosystem.
• Develop and maintain documentation, including system designs, configurations, and SOPs for order-to-cash processes.
• Lead UAT and deployment processes for platform releases, patches, and upgrades.
• Own incident management and root-cause analysis for payment outages, failed settlements, and reconciliation discrepancies, including executive-level reporting.
• Lead the definition and enforcement of SLAs and OLAs across internal teams and vendors.
• Third-Party Payment Management
• Own the technical design and operations of systems that receive, process, and reconcile payments from government agencies (e.g., childcare subsidy programs), employer sponsors, and other third-party payers on behalf of families.
• Manage integrations with third-party billing and payment portals, ensuring accurate application of funds against family accounts.
• Partner with Finance and Operations to ensure third-party payment data flows correctly across billing, enrollment, and reconciliation systems.
• Maintain documentation and SOPs specific to third-party payment intake, exception handling, and reconciliation workflows.
• Act as the primary liaison between IT, Finance, Operations, and childcare management vendor support.
• Provide guidance and technical leadership to analysts, developers, and support teams.
• Support Finance and Operations in defining business requirements, translating them into functional and technical solutions across billing, collections, third-party payment programs, and payment processing workflows.

Minimum Job Qualifications (Required)

• 5+ years of experience supporting or administering childcare management software, payment processing, credit card processing, or POS systems in a multi-location enterprise environment.
• Strong technical knowledge of order-to-cash processes, including billing, payment collection, credit card transactions, chargebacks, reconciliation, and third-party payment programs.
• Hands-on experience with system configuration, integrations, and payment gateway APIs.
• Familiarity with PCI-DSS compliance requirements and payment security standards.
• Ability to lead technical projects from design through implementation.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work with both technical and business stakeholders.

Preferred

• Experience with government subsidy or third-party billing programs (e.g., childcare assistance, employer-sponsored care, or similar benefit payment programs).
• Experience with payment gateway platforms (e.g., Stripe, Braintree, Adyen, or similar) and POS hardware/software integration.
• Background in ERP, billing, or financial systems.
• Experience leading or mentoring technical staff.
• Knowledge of SQL, reporting tools, or data analytics.
• Experience with middleware, ETL frameworks, or API integration platforms (e.g., Dell Boomi, MuleSoft).