Payments Product Specialist

Product / Technical Operations · Cincinnati, St. Louis, or Remote · Full time $84,900 to $115,000 base, plus equity

Why this role exists

There is a point where a platform gets deep enough that knowing it well stops being something people pick up along the way and becomes a job on its own. We are at that point.

We sit behind bank partners across the US. Each one is configured to its own requirements, and each has business customers who use the product differently. Those combinations matter. A capability enabled during one bank's implementation can shape what their customers experience nine months later, and it will only ever show up as a pattern if someone is looking for patterns.

We are hiring the person who looks for them — the one who understands our product more deeply than anyone, and who owns the problems no one else can explain.

What the work actually is

Two of our bank partners are configured almost identically. One of them generates four times the support volume on one workflow. It is not a bug, and it is not user error. It is a capability enabled during implementation interacting with how that bank onboarded its customers, and nobody has put those two facts next to each other yet.

Finding that takes our backend, what the interface actually showed the user, a conversation with a processor contact, and an implementation record from last year. Four sources, none of which is sufficient alone, at least one of which is wrong.

That is the job. Diagnosis first, then ownership of the fix, then making sure the next person does not have to repeat the work.

What you will own

Product expertise. You become the deepest expert we have on how the application behaves. Not familiar with it — expert in it: what every setting does and what it changes downstream for a bank and its customers. When the product does something no one can explain, you are the person who explains it.

Diagnosis. When something is blocking payments or degrading the experience and it is not the rails, you find the cause. Recipient and beneficiary setup, entitlements, company and subcompany structure, and product settings that differ bank to bank. You separate defect from configuration from user error, unblock the customer now, pursue the root cause after, and hand engineering the urgent ones with enough detail that they can act the same day.

Enablement. You are the internal answer to how does this actually work. Sales asking whether we can support a prospect's structure. Customer success asking why a bank and its customer see different things. Implementation asking what a configuration choice will cost us in six months. The goal is not to be the bottleneck; it is to turn what you know into documentation and runbooks so the questions stop coming.

Escalation. Our support desk owns the routine ticket volume. You are their escalation point for what they cannot resolve, and you cover the desk during the support manager's planned absences. You also own the advanced payment exceptions: the ones that recur, that do not resolve through the normal processor path, or that point at something structural.

What you bring

Deep product instinct. You get inside a software product until you understand it better than almost anyone — what every setting does and what it changes downstream. You are the person others come to when something is behaving in a way no one can explain, and you are happiest owning the escalations the front line cannot crack.

Technical depth without being an engineer. You will not write code. You will get into a database, read it, and organize what you find into an answer. SQL — or something close to it — is a hard requirement here, not a nice-to-have. If you cannot independently pull and interrogate data to test a theory, this is not the role.

Payments fluency. Cross-border, SWIFT, wires, ACH, returns and investigations. Not because you will spend your days tracing payments — our support desk and processing partners handle that well — but because you cannot rule the rails in or out without it, and that call is most of the diagnostic work. This is required.

Comfort with incomplete information. Everyone says they are a problem solver. What we are looking for is the person who can describe the moment they realized a system was telling them something false and went looking for a third source.

Judgment about when to stop. Knowing when a workaround serves the customer better than a root cause, and when to escalate rather than spend another two hours, is part of the skill and not a failure of it.

The patience to explain. A meaningful share of the value here is making the platform legible to colleagues who do not work in it daily, repeatedly, without condescension.

Experience

Roughly 3 to 10 years, and we mean the range honestly. What matters is not the title on the path but the shape of the work: hands-on product, technical support, application or production support, solutions, or operations work on a software product, where you were the person who diagnosed the hard problems rather than routed them. Payments or fintech backgrounds — bank operations, treasury operations, processor operations, implementation, or technical support of a payments product — are where this experience most naturally comes from.

What does not work is depth that has gone stale. If your last two years were spent managing people who solve these problems rather than solving them, this is not the right role.

What this role is not

It has no direct reports, and will not for the foreseeable future. We are hiring a practitioner, not a manager.

It is not routine payment tracing. Support and our processing partners handle everyday status questions. You get what is left.

It is not a stepping stone with a short hands-on period attached. If volume grows enough that this function needs a second person, you are the obvious internal candidate to grow into a Payments Platform Manager scope, but that is driven by volume rather than tenure.

Your first 90 days

By day 30 you know our application, our integration partners, and our live issue patterns, and you are working real escalations.

By day 60 you are taking escalations from support without help, and you can answer configuration questions from sales, CS, and implementation directly.

By day 90 you have a documented view of the recurring issue patterns across our bank partners, and a prioritized list of the configuration, tooling, and product changes that would eliminate the highest-volume ones.

About PayRecs

PayRecs is the platform community and regional banks use to offer modern cross-border B2B payments to their business customers. Banks get a best-in-class payments product under their own brand and a new revenue line for their treasury team; their business customers get international payments that are simple and transparent. We are post-Series A, live with 20 bank partners across the US, integrated directly with payment providers including Visa and Corpay, and partnered with digital banking platforms like Q2.

We are a small team, which means this role is visible from day one and the work you do shows up in the product.

Compensation and benefits

Base salary $84,900 to $115,000 plus equity, with placement in the range depending on depth of relevant experience.

• Open PTO
• Employee stock options
• Health care with HMO and PPO options, plus dental and vision
• Annual office stipend
• Remote or in-office, whichever works better for you

Applying

Alongside your application, please answer two questions:

1. Describe a customer-reported problem you determined was caused by configuration rather than user error or a defect. How did you establish that, what did you have to pull together, and what did you do about it?

2. Describe a time you decided to stop investigating and escalate. What made you stop, and was it the right call?