Strategist, Card Authorization

About Stripe

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform that enables businesses to accept payments, grow revenue, and accelerate new opportunities.

The Global Payments Performance Team identifies payment optimization opportunities for Stripe’s merchants, partners with high‑potential customers, and delivers best‑in‑class technology and insights to achieve business goals.

The team leads data‑driven discussions with merchants on optimization strategies across card network costs, acceptance, fraud, and cross‑border flows. You will build optimization narratives/tools, deliver the merchant engagement model, partner with Sales, and collaborate with Customer Success to ensure merchant success.

• Lead discussions with existing and prospective merchants, and provide the Sales team with tools and training.
• Serve as both an internal and merchant‑facing expert on payment optimization strategies.
• Gather and build on Stripe’s payments expertise to create optimization narratives/tools supported by rigorous analysis.
• Use existing tools to deploy sophisticated optimization playbooks and analyses across Stripe’s customer portfolio.
• Synthesize and relay customer feedback and findings to inform the product roadmap.
• Provide feedback on tools and playbooks to help continuously improve our self‑serve offerings.

• 5+ years of experience in payments or operations at a leading technology company, or a payments industry consultancy.
• Expertise diagnosing root causes of card authorization rate underperformance and suggesting actionable steps.
• Deep understanding of improving merchant card authorization rates (ISO message optimization, retry logic, issuer‑level analysis, etc.).
• Ability to partner with merchants to structure and deliver A/B tests comparing card authorization rate performance across PSPs.
• Experience helping merchants onboard to a new PSP with optimal authorization rate performance from day one.

• Experience with SQL, dashboard building, modeling, or reporting.
• Understanding of card network rules and regulations, local payment methods, and the regulatory environment (PSD2/PSD3).
• Experience presenting to senior business leaders.
• Ability to advise merchants on managing fraud across card and alternative payment methods.
• Understanding of reducing merchant‑level interchange and scheme fees.

This role is available either in an office or from a remote location (35+ miles or 56+ km from a Stripe office). In‑office employees are expected to spend at least 50% of their time in their local office or with users. Remote employees are expected to work primarily from home and are not reimbursed for relocation costs.

Annual US base salary range: $172,200 - $258,400. Additional benefits may include equity, company bonuses or sales commissions, 401(k) plan, medical, dental, vision benefits, and wellness stipends.