Payments Manager

**We power people's progress.**:
At Preply, we're all about creating life-changing learning experiences. We help people discover the magic of the perfect tutor, craft a personalized learning journey, and stay motivated to keep growing. Our approach is human-led, tech-enabled - and it's creating real impact. So far, 90,000 tutors have delivered over 20 million lessons to learners in more than 175 countries. Every Preply lesson sparks change, fuels ambition, and drives progress that matters.

**Meet the team**:
Payments at Preply is becoming its own department, reflecting its central role in driving growth, tutor liquidity, and platform efficiency.

As our first Payments Manager, you will lead the strategic planning of our Payment service providers set up and collaborate with Product on the payments product roadmap across both pay-ins and pay-outs.

This is a critical role that will drive Preply's future growth by leading initiatives to reduce costs and boost monetization. Payments are core to our platform, impacting conversion, retention, tutor liquidity, and efficiency. As complexity grows, we are looking for a strong operator to evolve our global payment stack.

**What you'll be doing**:

- **Strategic Payment Development**: Collaborate with Product Managers to develop and implement Preply's payment strategy, fostering company growth through engendering payment initiatives that support expansion.
- **Partnership Expansion**: Expand Preply's payment offerings by building and owning relationships with Payment Service Providers (PSPs), Alternative Payment Methods (APMs), and payout partners, including negotiating new agreements.
- **Performance Optimization**: Monitor payment success rates for both pay-in and pay-out methods across all geographies. Team up internally with Product teams to improve company success rates.
- **Operational Monitoring & Improvement**: Become an active voice in monitoring and enhancing authorization rates, and minimizing payment errors.
- **Cross-functional Collaboration**: Work closely with Product, Data, Finance, Legal, and Customer Support teams to prioritize and ensure department OKRs achievement.
- **Risk & Compliance**: Ensure compliance, risk management, and fraud prevention as the company scales.
- **FX Performance**: Drive and report on FX performance in collaboration with Finance and Treasury teams.
- **Product Roadmap Participation**: Actively participate in the payment product roadmap for both Pay-in and Pay-out, particularly in unlocking new partnerships with PSPs, APMs, and other relevant entities.
- **Roadmap Alignment**: Align with the Product team on roadmap delivery and experimentation to improve payment performance and reduce costs.

**What you need to succeed**:

- Strong background in payments operations within the payments, e-commerce, financial services, and/or technology sectors. Eager to join a rapidly growing company.
- Proven track record of setting forth a payments strategy, creating and running internal RFI processes, and successfully building and launching products at scale.
- Experience optimizing for FX costs and currency routing across pay-in and pay-out flows.
- Experience scaling and consolidating our PSP and APM infrastructure.
- Ability to drive commercial efficiency and negotiate cost reductions with payment providers.
- Ability to hit the ground running, adapt quickly, and take an action-oriented, roll-up-your-sleeves approach focused on measurable results.
- Proven ability to create clarity in ambiguity and confidently solve complex problems.
- Excellent communication skills and a track record of championing the best ideas.
- Collaborative and responsive approach to working with cross-functional teams in fast-paced settings.
- Comfort operating in dynamic, high-growth environments with shifting priorities

**Why you'll love it at Preply**:

- An open, collaborative, dynamic and diverse culture;
- A competitive financial package with equity, leave allowance and health insurance;
- Not in Barcelona? We offer an attractive relocation package to join us in our Preply Barcelona Hub
- Access to free mental health support platforms;
- Access to Gympass-partnered wellness and gym centers throughout Spain to promote and support well-being and physical health;
- The opportunity to unlock the potential of learners and tutors through language learning and teaching in 175 countries (and counting).

**Our Principles**:

- **Care to change the world** - We are passionate about our work and care deeply about its impact to be life changing.
- **We do it for learners** - For both Preply and tutors, learners are why we do what we do. Every day we focus on empowering tutors to deliver an exceptional learning experience.
- **Keep perfecting**:

- To create an outstanding customer experience, we focus on simplicity, smoothness, and enjoyment, continually perfecting it as every detail matters.
- **Now is the time** - In a fast-paced world, it matters how quickly w