Quality Assurance Team Lead - Payment Operations

Join Wise’s Quality Assurance team and help us build world-class, scalable operations that keep customers safe and deliver great experiences. In this role, you’ll provide independent, expert assurance over how work is done—spotting risk, identifying control gaps, and turning insights into clear, practical improvements. You’ll balance attention to detail with strong judgement, using data and tools to form well-reasoned conclusions that stand up to scrutiny. You’ll work closely with partners across the business, sharing themes and trends, contributing to consistent decision-making, and helping raise the bar on quality—while keeping pace in a fast-moving environment aligned to our mission of Money Without Borders. Candidates with experience in the Payments domain and a strong, end-to-end understanding of how money moves through a modern payments business. Pay-In & Pay-Out: Deep familiarity with how customer funds are received, processed, and disbursed across multiple payment methods and rails. Reconciliation & Settlement: Solid grasp of how transactions are matched, balanced, and settled between internal systems, banking partners, and payment schemes. Exception Handling & Operational Excellence: Ability to diagnose and resolve payment issues — failures, returns, refunds, chargebacks — while balancing speed, accuracy, and customer experience. Key Responsibilities: Leadership : Lead by example and drive a customer focused and proactive risk & compliance management mindset across your team and the wider organization. Promote a culture of ownership and accountability. Build high-performing teams that value knowledge sharing and continuous learning. People management: Coach and develop a strong and competent QA team. Conduct regular one on one coaching sessions and performance reviews. Deliver initiatives to help your team to grow their skills, behaviours, and competencies. Design and manage plans to support development. Conduct regular check-ins and make robust recommendations to support Wise performance management activities. Operational management: Be accountable for your area of operations. Identify, propose and drive opportunities for improvements. Collaborate with central functions and other teams as needed to increase automation and operational efficiency. Monitor team resource allocation and refine standard operating procedures to scale and deliver quality QA that stakeholders can trust and rely on. Take a proactive approach to consistently achieving individual and team targets (KPIs, SLAs), demonstrating a strong commitment to both quality and speed. Meet deadlines, optimise processing times and take full ownership and accountability to deliver results. Ensure effective communication and escalation of blockers impacting delivery of the QA outcomes supported with actions that are being taken or required. Performance management : Be fully responsible for performance of your area of operations. Drive the initiatives, KPIs and OKRs of your area in line with the organisation’s strategic vision. Ensure that your team has appropriate plans in place to meet performance and quality targets. Create comprehensive plans for developing future leaders. Provide regular coaching and work with your direct reports to inspire them and develop their skills. Be an advocate for the company values, our long term strategic goals and promote them across the organization. Technical Excellence: Take responsibility for the accuracy and validity of the QA outcomes of the domain (Payment Defect and Exception Handling), applying your subject matter expertise to calibrate on QA outcomes, leading Root Cause Analysis at the QA domain level inclusive of performing RCA on more complex subjects, engaging the RCA team for support where necessary. Stakeholders management & communication : Collaborate closely with your stakeholders and communicate complex topics in an easy to understand and engaging way. Translate aggregated QA data into a compelling narrative, pre