Payments Performance Strategist, Card Authorization

Job Overview

The Payments Performance Strategist, Card Authorization role is part of Stripe's Global Payments Performance Team. This team identifies payment optimization opportunities for Stripe's merchants. As a Payments Performance Strategist, you will lead data-driven discussions with existing and prospective merchants on optimization strategies across various areas, including card network costs, acceptance, fraud, and cross-border flows.

Responsibilities

• Lead discussions with existing and prospective merchants, and provide the Sales team with tools and training to lead discussions with merchants and prospects.
• Serve as both an internal and merchant-facing expert on payment optimization strategies.
• Gather and build on Stripe's wide-ranging payments expertise to create optimization narratives/tools supported by rigorous analysis.
• Use existing tools to deploy sophisticated optimization playbooks and analyses across Stripe's customer portfolio.
• Synthesize and relay customer feedback and findings to inform Stripe's product roadmap.
• Provide feedback on tools and playbooks to help continuously improve self-serve offerings.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in payments or operations at a leading technology company, or consultancy in the payments industry.
• Expertise in diagnosing the root cause of card authorization rate underperformance, and suggesting actionable steps to address root cause issues identified.
• Deep understanding of how to improve merchant card authorization rates (e.g., ISO message optimization, retry logic, issuer-level analysis).
• Ability to partner with merchants to structure and deliver A/B tests that compare card authorization rate performance across PSPs.
• Experience helping merchants onboard to a new PSP such that their authorization rate performance is optimal from day one.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with SQL, dashboard building, modeling, or reporting.
• Understanding of card network rules and regulations, local payment methods, and the regulatory environment (PSD2/PSD3).
• Experience presenting to senior business leaders.
• Ability to advise merchants on how to manage fraud, primarily on card transactions but ideally on alternative payment methods as well.
• An understanding of how to reduce merchant-level interchange and scheme fees.