Payments Operations Lead

Tabs is the leading AI-native revenue platform for modern finance and accounting teams. Tabs agents automate the entire contract-to-cash lifecycle, including billing, collections, revenue recognition, and reporting, to help teams eliminate manual work and accelerate cash flow. High-growth companies like Cursor and Statsig rely on Tabs to generate invoices directly from contracts, reconcile payments in real time, and automate ASC 606 compliance. Founded in 2023, Tabs has raised over $91 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners https://lsvp.com, General Catalyst https://www.generalcatalyst.com, and Primary https://www.primary.vc. The team is headquartered in New York and brings deep expertise in finance and AI. About the Role We're hiring a Payments Operations Lead in New York to build and own payment operations as Tabs brings payments in-house. This is a founding role on a new team, reporting to the VP of Finance. Tabs is moving billions of dollars of gross payment volume onto our own rails. You'll own how that money moves and how it's protected: reconciliation, disputes, reserves, fraud, and merchant risk. Our volume is ACH-first with a growing card share, and our merchants are few, large, and high-value, so the work rewards precision over throughput. You'll set the standard for how Tabs runs payments, not maintain one someone else already built. What You’ll Do - Build the function Choose the systems, define the architecture, and hire the team that comes after you. You decide what we build versus buy. - Own the risk register Map every way a chargeback, return, or merchant failure could cost Tabs money. Set detection triggers and remediation paths before each merchant goes live. - Set reserve strategy Define reserve amounts by merchant tier, negative balance triggers, and offset and clawback mechanics. Own the thresholds and escalation paths. - Run reconciliation Know where every dollar sits across balance accounts and settlement, daily. Build the cadence, the alerting thresholds, and the break-investigation process. - Set fraud and compliance posture Own the AML policy, the merchant acceptance policy, and the risk relationship with our payment partners. - Own disputes and chargebacks Build the merchant self-service system: evidence flow, deadlines, and escalation path. You own the outcome, not a queue. - Scale onboarding and migration Make underwriting, merchant sign-up, and acquirer migration hold up as we go from dozens of merchants to hundreds. Who You Are - Systems and Strategy Builder. You ask “what happens when a merchant goes bankrupt” before it happens, and architect for it ahead of time, rather than running the fire drill well. You think in terms of how systems scale and where the pressure points will be. - Sound Under Real Stakes. You’ve made the call on a reserve, a reconciliation break, or a fraud exception where being wrong cost real money — and you can explain why you made it. - Cross-Functional Range. You can read a payments addendum and a webhook payload in the same afternoon, and change Legal’s or Engineering’s mind when you’re right. - Builder Mentality. You’re energized by early-stage environments where processes are still being written and your impact is visible. - Metrics-Driven. You set thresholds, track KPIs (chargeback rates, reconciliation breaks, reserve adequacy, false positive rates), and make decisions based on data, not hunches. You know what good looks like and can measure it. - High Ownership. You bring energy, accountability, and a bias toward action — especially when things are moving fast. Experience - 5+ years in payments operations, risk, or fraud and dispute operations, including at least 2 years at a payment facilitator, processor, or platform — Stripe (Connect), Adyen for Platforms, Square/Block, Shopify Payments, or similar - A track record of building the process, not just operating one someone else designed - Fluency in how reserves, holdbacks, and offset rights actually operate agai…