Payments Performance Strategist, Card Authorization

Role overview

The Payments Performance Strategist (Card Authorization) will lead data-driven discussions with merchants to improve card authorization performance and other payment optimization areas. You will build and refine Stripe’s optimization narratives and tools, and partner across Sales and Customer Success to drive merchant outcomes and win deals.

Responsibilities

• Lead discussions with existing and prospective merchants on payment optimization strategies (initial focus: card network costs, acceptance, fraud, and cross-border flows)
• Serve as an internal and merchant-facing expert on payment optimization strategies
• Build optimization narratives/tools using rigorous analysis and Stripe’s payments expertise
• Use existing tools to deploy sophisticated optimization playbooks and analyses across the customer portfolio
• Synthesize and relay customer feedback and findings to inform Stripe’s product roadmap
• Provide Sales enablement: tools and training to help them run merchant conversations
• Collaborate with Customer Success to help merchants succeed working with Stripe
• Improve self-serve offerings by gathering feedback on tools and playbooks

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in payments or operations at a leading technology company or in payments consulting
• Strong ability to diagnose root causes of card authorization rate underperformance and propose actionable fixes
• Deep understanding of methods to improve merchant/card authorization rates (e.g., ISO message optimization, retry logic, issuer-level analysis)
• Ability to partner with merchants to design and deliver A/B tests comparing card authorization rate performance across PSPs
• Experience helping merchants onboard to a new PSP while achieving optimal authorization performance from day one

Preferred qualifications

• SQL and experience with dashboard building, modeling, and reporting
• Knowledge of card network rules/regulations, local payment methods, and regulatory environment (PSD2/PSD3)
• Experience presenting to senior business leaders
• Ability to advise on fraud management (card-first, and ideally alternative payment methods)
• Understanding of how to reduce merchant interchange and scheme fees