Associate Director, Operations Strategy

About Airwallex Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by our unique combination of proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 250,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, Navan, Qantas, SHEIN and many more – with fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, spend management and treasury, to embedded finance at a global scale. Proudly founded in Melbourne, we have a team of over 2,300 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 27 offices around the globe. Valued at US$11 billion and backed by world-leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, Robinhood Ventures, Sequoia, Salesforce Ventures, DST Global, and Lone Pine Capital, Airwallex is leading the charge in building the global payments and financial platform of the future. If you’re ready to do the most ambitious work of your career, join us. Attributes We Value We hire successful builders with founder-like energy who want real impact, accelerated learning, and true ownership. You bring strong role-related expertise and sharp thinking, and you’re motivated by our mission and operating principles . You move fast with good judgment, dig deep with curiosity, and make decisions from first principles, balancing speed and rigor. You're humble and collaborative; turn zero‑to‑one ideas into real products, and you “get stuff done” end-to-end. You use AI to work smarter and solve problems faster. Here, you’ll tackle complex, high‑visibility problems with exceptional teammates and grow your career as we build the future of global banking. If that sounds like you, let’s build what’s next. About the team 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. What you'll do As the Associate Director, Operations Strategy, you will own and scale the operational backbone of Airwallex's Americas business, spanning financial operations, client enablement, enterprise customer readiness, and process improvement. You will lead a team responsible for resolving complex payment and settlement exceptions, enabling commercial teams to configure and launch customers at speed, and ensuring enterprise clients move from signed contract to live-in-production with minimal friction. The work is cross-functional by nature: you will partner daily with Solution Engineers, Commercial teams, Financial Partnerships, Product, and Engineering to remove operational bottlenecks and build scalable processes that support Airwallex's rapid growth across the region. This role reports to the Head of Operations, US and offers significant scope to shape how operations scales in the Americas. 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 ha