Associate Director, Operations Strategy

Associate Director, Operations Strategy

The Operations team at Airwallex sits at the intersection of strategy, execution, and customer experience. The Operations Strategy function drives process optimization, strategic initiatives, and cross-functional program delivery across Airwallex's global operations. We partner closely with Engineering, Product, Legal, Security, and Data teams to solve complex problems at scale, ensuring that our operational infrastructure keeps pace with Airwallex's rapid growth. This is a team where you will have direct exposure to senior leadership, work on high-impact programs that shape how the company operates, and grow through ownership of ambiguous, cross-domain challenges.

This role is based in San Francisco.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and oversee financial operations workstreams including payment and deposit investigations, settlement exceptions, banking-partner escalations, recalls, wallet adjustments, and transaction exception handling across Americas platforms.
• Drive client enablement by partnering with commercial teams to configure customer accounts, enable products and capabilities, manage non-standard pricing, and resolve operational onboarding issues that block revenue activation.
• Own enterprise customer readiness by coordinating go-live checklists, operational readiness reviews, support model design, payment configuration, billing, pricing, and post-sale handoffs to ensure seamless launches for strategic accounts.
• Improve operational processes and service quality by redesigning SOPs, increasing straight-through processing rates, enhancing customer experience, strengthening incident handling and escalation frameworks, managing partner migrations, and building operational controls across Americas platforms.
• Work across functions (Product, Engineering, Financial Partnerships, Commercial, Customer Support) to ensure stakeholder alignment, map dependencies, and deliver desired outcomes on strategic initiatives.
• Lead, coach, and develop a team of operations professionals, setting clear objectives, running performance calibrations, and building a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and operational excellence.

Minimum qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in operations, strategy, or program management within a fast-growing technology, fintech, or payments company, or at a top-tier strategy/management consulting firm.
• 2+ years of people management experience, with a demonstrated ability to build, lead, and develop high-performing teams.
• Exceptional stakeholder management and influencing skills, with the ability to align cross-functional partners (Engineering, Product, Commercial, Partnerships) around shared outcomes.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a data-driven approach to identifying root causes, measuring operational performance, and prioritizing improvements.
• Excellent written and verbal communication and presentation skills, including the ability to synthesize complex operational issues and communicate them clearly to both technical and executive audiences.
• Self-starter who can identify and prioritize opportunities in ambiguous environments, drive clarity where none exists, and deliver results independently.

Equal opportunity

Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don't regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.