Technical Operations Manager

About Owl Payments Europe

The Tripadvisor Group connects people to experiences worth sharing, and aims to be the world’s most trusted source for travel and experiences. We leverage our brands, technology, and capabilities to connect our global audience with partners through rich content, travel guidance, and two-sided marketplaces for experiences, accommodations, restaurants, and other travel categories. The subsidiaries of Tripadvisor, Inc. (Nasdaq: TRIP), include a portfolio of travel brands and businesses, including Tripadvisor, Viator, and TheFork.

Owl Payments Europe is a licensed Payment Institution regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland and part of the Tripadvisor Group. Owl supports regulated supplier onboarding and payments operations for Viator’s European ecosystem.  This is an opportunity to help shape operations in a newly regulated and growing payments institution. The role offers broad exposure across payments, operational resilience, vendor governance, Financial Crime operations and cross-functional delivery, with high visibility across Owl and Tripadvisor / Viator.

We are hiring a Technical Operations Manager to strengthen operational execution and change delivery across Owl’s live regulated payments environment. This role sits at the intersection of operations, technology, vendor management and control execution. You will identify operational pain points, drive process redesign and targeted system or workflow enhancements, and coordinate cross-functional delivery across key services and vendors to keep Owl scalable, well controlled and regulator-ready.

The role works closely with Financial Crime subject matter experts across KYC/KYB onboarding and AML/CFT transaction monitoring, as well as Product, Engineering, Customer Support, Fraud, Risk, Compliance, Finance and Group partners. This is not a pure engineering role and it is not a second-line compliance advisory role. It is a hands-on first-line operations role focused on translating operational issues into practical process, tooling and feature improvements, while also coordinating incidents, service continuity and operational governance.

Job Location: Remote (Poland)

This role is a remote position in Poland. Occasional travel to company offices as necessary.

We are able to offer only Umowa o Pracę/Permanent Contract

What You’ll Do

Process improvement, systems enhancement and change delivery

• Identify operational pain points, control gaps and recurring failure points across onboarding, payment flows, AML/CFT operations and support workflows.
• Translate issues into practical process redesign, tooling changes, workflow enhancements and clear business or operational requirements.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, FinCrime and business teams to shape, prioritise and implement process changes and targeted system feature enhancements.
• Define success measures and track whether changes deliver measurable improvements in efficiency, control robustness, service quality and scalability.

Operational incident management and service continuity

• Act as the first point of coordination for operational issues, service disruptions and cross-workstream queries.
• Triage incidents, assign owners, track actions, and ensure timely escalation, stakeholder communication and closure.
• Coordinate root cause analysis, post-incident actions and preventive improvements, ensuring lessons learned feed into longer-term fixes.
• Maintain operational runbooks, issue logs, decision logs and escalation paths.

Cross-functional coordination and delivery

• Own the daily operational rhythm across Product, Engineering, FinCrime, Customer Support, Fraud, Risk, Compliance and Finance.
• Coordinate non-technical operational dependencies and unblock issues affecting supplier onboarding, payment flows and service delivery.
• Support operational readiness for releases, process changes, vendor changes and platform transitions.
• Ensure actions, decisions, dependencies and risks are tracked through to completion through Jira, Confluence or equivalent tooling.

Vendor and third-party oversight

• Monitor performance of outsourced service providers and critical third parties under Owl’s outsourcing / OSP framework.
• Track SLAs, service issues, remediation items and recurring performance themes, and support vendor governance follow-up.
• Provide operational input to risk, compliance and audit reviews relating to third-party services.

Operational reporting, controls and governance

• Produce and maintain operational MI, dashboards and KPIs covering service performance, incidents, backlog, quality, change outcomes and control effectiveness.
• Support the COO/CIO and control functions with accurate data, control evidence and management reporting.
• Contribute to internal reviews, audits, risk assessments and regulatory readiness activities.
• Help ensure that key operational processes are documented, repeatable and supported by appropriate controls.

Skills & Experience:

• 5+ years of experience in operations, service management, technical program management, payments operations, risk operations, or a similar cross-functional role in fintech, payments, e-commerce, marketplaces, or another regulated environment.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI tools to improve efficiency, quality, and decision-making in day-to-day work.
• Proven ability to operate effectively with a global-first mindset 
• Demonstrated experience driving process redesign, operational improvement and system or workflow changes in partnership with technical and business teams.
• Experience translating operational problems into structured requirements, user stories, process maps, playbooks or change actions that can be implemented and tracked.
• Demonstrated experience coordinating incidents, escalations, dependencies or service issues across technical and business teams.
• Experience working with outsourced providers or vendors, including SLA monitoring, service reviews and follow-up of remediation actions.
• Strong operational and analytical mindset, with experience using data to prioritise issues, measure outcomes and improve performance.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate complex issues for technical and non-technical stakeholders, including senior management.
• Comfort working alongside Financial Crime SMEs in KYC/KYB onboarding and AML/CFT transaction monitoring, with sufficient understanding of regulated operational controls to coordinate effectively across those areas.

Preferred experience

• Experience in a regulated payments institution, e-money institution, acquirer, processor, marketplace or banking environment.
• Familiarity with first-line risk and control ownership, operational resilience, incident management, change governance and third-party risk or outsourcing governance.
• Working knowledge of KYC/KYB onboarding, AML/CFT operations, fraud operations or customer support workflows.
• Experience with Jira, Confluence, Excel or Google Sheets, BI or dashboarding tools, SQL, process-mapping tools, workflow automation platforms or AI-enabled productivity tools.
• Exposure to regulatory or audit environments and evidence-based control management.

How you will work

• You think in systems and processes, not just symptoms, and you look for durable fixes rather than repeated workarounds.
• You stay calm under pressure and exercise sound judgement during incidents and live operational issues.
• You are highly organised, detail-oriented and comfortable following issues through to closure.
• You are collaborative and pragmatic, and you build trust across operations, product, engineering and control functions.
• You are comfortable challenging assumptions and escalating appropriately when risks are not being addressed.

What success looks like

• Operational pain points are converted into practical process changes, system enhancements and clearer controls that improve efficiency and resilience.
• Operational issues and incidents are triaged through a clear, reliable coordination model with visible ownership and timely escalation.
• Operational MI and KPI reporting give management a clearer view of service health, risks, recurring bottlenecks and the impact of change initiatives.
• Cross-functional coordination with FinCrime, Product and Engineering is stronger during live issues, releases, process changes and vendor or platform transitions.
• Vendor performance and key operational workflows are better governed, better documented and more scalable.

What We Offer:

• Competitive compensation packages (routinely benchmarked against the latest industry data), including base salary and annual bonuses
• “Work your way” with flexibility to suit your lifestyle. Tripadvisor Group takes a remote-friendly approach to collaboration across a worldwide team, with the option to join on-site as often as you’d like or as required by your team.
• Flexible schedule. Work-life balance is ingrained in our culture by design. Trust and accountability make it work.
• Donation matching. Give back? Give more! We match qualifying charitable donations annually.
• Tuition assistance. Want to level up your career? We love to hear it! Receive annual support for qualified programs.
• Lifestyle benefit. An annual benefit to spend on yourself. Use it on travel, wellness, or whatever suits you.
• Travel perks. We believe that travel is employee development, so we provide discounts and more.
• Employee assistance program. We’re here for you with resources and programs to help you through life’s challenges.
• Health benefits. We offer great coverage and competitive premiums.
• Generous referral scheme. Help us grow and be rewarded with generous awards for referring successful candidates.

Our Cultural Pillars:

Traveler first

We exist to create value for our customer, the traveler. We enable our suppliers and partners to unlock this value. Their collective behaviors and insights are what drives us. 

Execution is our edge

We act fast, experiment, learn from failure, iterate, and improve the solutions of tomorrow across every aspect of our business. Our execution is agile, data-driven, prioritised, and built to scale. We assume no problem is someone else’s problem and finish what can be done today, knowing tomorrow will bring fresh challenges. 

We succeed together

The best outcomes are driven by empathic, humble, and diverse subject matter experts working toward shared goals. We collaborate relentlessly, challenge assumptions, give actionable feedback, and set each other up for success through empowered teams with a clear charter. We transparently take ownership of our growth, individually and as a team. We celebrate the quality of our effort, our learnings, and our collective achievements.

We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please make sure to reach out to your individual recruiter or our team at AccessibleRecruiting@tripadvisor.com.

If you have any additional questions about careers at Tripadvisor you can email us at recruitment@tripadvisor.com. We have all the answers!

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