Director Product

Position: Director, Payments Performance - Product
Location: New York

CLEAR is building THE secure identity company of the future. Our mission is to make experiences safer and easier—physically and digitally. With more than 43 million Members and a growing network of partners across the world, CLEAR's secure identity platform is transforming the way people live, work, and travel. Whether it’s at the airport, stadium, or throughout your everyday life, CLEAR unlocks the magic of frictionless experiences.

The Director, Payments Performance will own how money moves at CLEAR, driving payment authorization, renewal recovery, fraud and dispute performance, and cost of acceptance. Reporting to the SVP of Product, you’ll bring deep payments expertise to turn issuer, network, processor, and Member insights into product strategy, experiments, and measurable business outcomes.

You’ll work alongside our Payments Product Lead, who owns the payments platform and Member-facing experiences. While, you own how the system performs, turning payment performance insights into product, processor, network, and issuer action.

What You’ll Do:

Own CLEAR’s payment performance end to end, driving first-attempt authorization, renewal recovery, involuntary churn, fraud and chargeback performance, false-positive rates, and effective cost of acceptance.

Diagnose performance across issuers, networks, card types, wallets, channels, and Member cohorts; establish a single source of truth for payments performance and translate decline patterns into clear, prioritized opportunities.

Define and drive CLEAR’s authorization and recovery roadmap with Product, Engineering, and Analytics, optimizing retry and dunning strategies, network tokens and account updater, stored credentials, transaction messaging, routing, wallets, fraud controls, and authentication.

Lead CLEAR’s performance relationships with processors, card networks, and issuers, holding partners accountable to benchmarks, resolving systemic approval issues, and evaluating opportunities across routing, acquiring, and processor strategy.

Partner across Product, Finance, Analytics, Engineering, and Member Support to run rigorous experiments, balance approval gains with fraud and dispute exposure, improve payment economics, and evolve CLEAR’s payments strategy as we expand into new products, partners, and markets.

How You’ll Measure Success:

Increased first-attempt authorization rates for new and renewing Members.

Increased recovery of failed renewals and reduced payment-related involuntary churn.

Fraud, chargeback, and false-positive rates maintained within defined targets and applicable network monitoring thresholds.

Reduced effective cost of acceptance while improving overall payment performance and recovered revenue.

What You’re Great At:10+ years of deep payments experience on the merchant or acceptance side of a high-volume consumer or subscription business, processor, or card network, with direct accountability for authorization and payment performance.

Expert knowledge of card payment economics and transaction life cycles, including issuer decisioning, recurring billing, decline optimization, network tokenization, account updater, stored credentials, fraud and disputes, and network monitoring programs.

Turning complex payment data into action, with experience working directly with data and SQL, developing analyses such as decline waterfalls, and translating insights into product decisions and measurable business outcomes.

Influencing across the payments ecosystem, with a track record of partnering directly with processors, networks, and issuers to diagnose systemic issues, improve performance, negotiate effectively, and drive accountability.

Strong product and commercial judgment, with experience partnering with Product and Engineering to ship…