About Pine Labs:

Pine Labs is a leading fintech company building technology and financial solutions across payments, commerce, and embedded finance. With a strong presence across India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, Pine Labs enables businesses to accept payments, access financial services, and manage commerce more efficiently.

We are looking for a Manager Cards & Payments Operations to lead Level 1 production support operations for our Cards and Payments systems. The role will be responsible for ensuring high system availability, seamless transaction processing, timely incident resolution, and effective operational governance.

The role involves managing a team of L1 support engineers/analysts and working closely with internal technology and business teams, banks, payment networks, and external partners.

Role Purpose:

The Manager will own the day-to-day L1 support and production operations for Cards & Payments systems, ensuring transaction stability, SLA adherence, incident resolution, and operational excellence.

The role requires strong domain knowledge of card and payment transaction flows, hands-on experience in production support, and the ability to lead teams and coordinate with multiple stakeholders in a high-pressure environment.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Operations & Incident Management:

- Manage day-to-day L1 production support operations for Cards & Payments systems.

- Monitor transaction flows across Authorization, Clearing, and Settlement.

- Ensure timely identification, resolution, and escalation of incidents within defined SLAs.

- Perform initial troubleshooting and coordinate with L2/L3 teams for complex technical issues.

- Manage production issues across POS, ATM, E-commerce, UPI, and Wallet transactions.

- Ensure effective incident logging, tracking, escalation, and closure.

- Drive timely communication during critical production incidents.

2. Stakeholder & Partner Management:

- Act as the primary operational point of contact for internal teams, banks, payment networks, and external partners.

- Coordinate with Visa, Mastercard, NPCI/RuPay, banks, and technology vendors for issue resolution.

- Provide regular incident updates, impact assessments, and resolution timelines to stakeholders.

- Coordinate RCA discussions and ensure closure of corrective and preventive actions.

3. Team Management:

- Lead and manage a team of L1 support engineers/analysts.

- Allocate work, manage shift rosters, and ensure effective 24x7 support coverage.

- Define and track team KPIs around productivity, SLA adherence, incident resolution, and ticket management.

- Conduct performance reviews and provide regular coaching and feedback.

- Build team capability through training, knowledge sharing, and structured support processes.

4. Monitoring & Operational Reporting:

- Monitor system health, transaction success rates, alerts, incidents, and operational dashboards.

- Track key metrics including transaction success rate, uptime, ticket ageing, backlog, and SLA adherence.

- Prepare and present daily, weekly, and monthly operational reports.

- Identify recurring incidents and operational trends and drive preventive actions.

5. Compliance & Process Governance:

- Ensure adherence to applicable regulatory, security, and payment network requirements.

- Ensure compliance with PCI-DSS and relevant Visa, Mastercard, NPCI/RuPay mandates.

- Maintain audit documentation, SOPs, process playbooks, and operational records.

- Ensure adherence to change management, release management, and incident management processes.

6. Continuous Improvement:

- Identify opportunities to automate repetitive operational activities and improve support efficiency.

- Drive initiatives to reduce incident response and resolution time.

- Identify recurring production issues and implement preventive measures.

- Improve operational processes, controls, and documentation.

- Support new product, payment, and system deployments from an operations readiness perspective.

What We Are Looking For:

Experience & Domain Expertise:

- 610 years of experience in Cards, Payments, Banking, Fintech, or Payment Processing.

- Strong hands-on experience in production support / payment operations / cards operations.

- Strong understanding of the card lifecycle, including Issuance, Authorization, Clearing, and Settlement.

- Strong understanding of payment transaction flows across POS, ATM, E-commerce, Contactless, UPI, and Wallets.

- Experience working with payment networks such as Visa, Mastercard, NPCI/RuPay.

- Exposure to card management systems and payment processing platforms.

- Knowledge of ISO 8583 messaging will be an advantage.

Technical Skills:

- Experience working with payment/card processing systems.

- Hands-on exposure to SFTP, file processing, settlement files, VCF/Base II or similar payment files.

- Basic understanding of networking concepts such as IP, VPN, Telnet testing, etc.

- Exposure to incident and service management tools such as JIRA, ServiceNow, and monitoring tools.

- Ability to perform basic production-level troubleshooting and effectively coordinate with L2/L3 technical teams.

Leadership & Behavioural Skills:

- Strong team leadership and people management skills.

- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.

- Strong analytical and problem-solving ability.

- Ability to make quick decisions and manage high-severity production incidents.

- Strong ownership and execution orientation.

- Ability to work effectively in a high-pressure, 24x7 production environment.

Qualifications:

- Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Technology, Finance, or a related discipline.

- Certifications in Payments, ITIL, Banking, or relevant technology domains will be an advantage.

Key Performance Indicators:

Success in this role will be measured through:

- Incident resolution within defined SLAs.

- Transaction success rate and system uptime.

- Reduction in ticket ageing and backlog.

- Incident response and resolution time.

- Stakeholder satisfaction.

- Team productivity and performance.

- Operational stability.

- Automation and process improvement initiatives.

Why This Role?:

This is an opportunity to take ownership of critical Cards & Payments operations in a high-growth fintech environment, lead a specialised operations team, work with major payment networks and financial institutions, and drive initiatives that directly impact transaction reliability and customer experience.