Senior Program Manager, Payment Operations - Payment Optimization

Chewy•Bellevue, WA

22h•Hybrid

About The Position

Chewy's mission is to be the most trusted and convenient destination for pet parents and partners everywhere. The Payments team improves the customer and care team experience by launching better ways to pay, increasing payment success, strengthening payment reliability, and reducing the cost and operational friction of payments. This role will report to the Head of Payment Partnerships & Operations and serve as a senior operational owner for complex payment capabilities across Chewy. The role will drive payment performance, operational readiness, partner escalation, incident response, and cross-functional execution across recurring, stored payment, and advanced authorization experiences. This includes Autoship and repeat purchase payment flows, stored credentials, backup payment methods, retries, decline recovery, tokenization, digital wallets, payment method lifecycle management, and scenarios involving multiple authorizations or merchant category code (MCC) configurations. The ideal candidate is an experienced payments and operations leader who has managed payment outcomes in a scaled ecommerce, fintech, subscription, retail, or omnichannel environment. This person brings strong payments knowledge, senior program leadership, and the ability to connect strategic priorities with hands-on operational execution across complex card-not-present and recurring payment models. They can simplify technical payment topics, identify customer and business impact, and lead cross-functional teams through measurable improvements in payment success, authorization performance, customer retention, and operational reliability. This role is well suited for someone who can partner effectively across Product, Engineering, Customer Care, Analytics, Finance, Accounting, Legal/Compliance, and external payment partners to improve customer experiences.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in business, finance, operations, technology, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
8+ years of experience in payments, fintech, ecommerce, retail, subscription billing, omnichannel operations, or another scaled operational environment.
5+ years leading complex cross-functional programs with Product, Engineering, Analytics, Finance, Accounting, Customer Care/Operations, Legal/Compliance, and external partners.
Experience supporting complex order and payment scenarios where a single order or customer transaction may require multiple authorizations, MCC configurations, settlement paths, or downstream reconciliation.
Demonstrated experience owning payment KPIs and operational outcomes such as payment success rate, authorization rate, decline rate, retry recovery, backup payment method performance, involuntary churn, dispute rate, reconciliation quality, cost of payments, or operational SLA performance.
Direct experience with card-not-present and recurring payment flows, including processors, acquirers, issuers, card networks, digital wallets, stored credentials, tokenization, account updater, settlement, refunds, disputes, and reconciliation.
Experience supporting ecommerce, subscription, and repeat purchase payment environments where reliability directly affects customer retention and business performance.
Strong analytical capability with the ability to use payment data, processor reporting, decline trends, authorization performance, customer feedback, and operational defects to identify root causes and drive action.
Proven ability to operate in ambiguity, dive deep into details, and lead teams through issue resolution without direct authority.
Strong vendor and partner management experience, including performance reviews, escalations, SLA management, roadmap alignment, and operational improvement plans.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience preparing executive-level narratives, business reviews, and decision recommendations.
Ability to deliver time-sensitive initiatives while maintaining strong attention to detail and ownership of follow-through.
Ability to travel up to 15% of the time.

Nice To Haves

Experience with payment models that include multi-authorization flows, multiple MCC configurations, settlement, and reconciliation.
Experience improving authorization performance through issuer, network, processor, card type, tokenization, digital wallet, debit routing, MCC, or decline-code analysis.
Experience launching or scaling payment capabilities that support high-volume stored payment methods.
Experience improving payment observability, operational support models, and partner performance in a high-volume environment.
Experience with card-not-present payment operations, including ecommerce, fintech, subscription, or other complex digital payment workflows.

Responsibilities

Own the operational health, performance, and optimization roadmap for advanced authorization capabilities, stored payment, and recurring, including multi-authorization flows, multiple MCC configurations, and payment method lifecycle workflows.
Define, monitor, and improve key payment metrics, including payment success rate, authorization performance, retry recovery, decline trends, multi-authorization outcomes, MCC configuration impacts, incident volume, and operational SLA performance.
Serve as the senior payment operations owner for launches, enhancements, defects, partner escalations, operational readiness, and post-launch performance management.
Lead cross-functional programs across Product, Engineering, Customer Care, Analytics, Finance, Accounting, Legal/Compliance, and external payment partners.
Identify payment defects, reliability risks, and customer friction across complex authorization, stored credential, and recurring flows; quantify customer, operational, and financial impact; and drive prioritized resolution.
Partner with payment processors, wallet providers, tokenization providers, and other third parties to manage operational performance, roadmap dependencies, issue resolution, SLAs, and improvement plans.
Analyze issuer, network, processor, card type, wallet, MCC, tokenization, debit routing, retry, and decline-code trends to identify optimization opportunities.
Build executive-ready narratives, business reviews, and recommendations that connect payment performance, customer experience, retention, cost, risk, and business impact.
Serve as a payments subject matter expert for card-not-present, stored credential, recurring billing, multi-authorization, tokenization, digital wallet, debit routing, MCC, refund, reconciliation, and operational support workflows.