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About Cleo

At Cleo, we're not just building another fintech app. We're embarking on a mission to fundamentally change humanity's relationship with money. Imagine a world where everyone, regardless of background or income, has access to a hyper-intelligent financial advisor in their pocket. That's the future we're creating.

Cleo is a profitable, fast-growing unicorn with over $200 million in ARR and growing over 2x year-over-year. We have an exceptionally high bar for talent, seeking individuals who are at the top of their field and embody our culture of collaboration and positive impact. If you’re driven by complex challenges and the chance to shape something transformative, this might be your perfect fit.

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About The Role

We’re looking for a Payments Analytics Manager to lead the measurement, monitoring, and optimisation of Cleo’s payments infrastructure. This is a high-impact role at the heart of how money moves through our platform. You’ll own the frameworks, metrics, and deep-dive analyses that ensure our payments systems run smoothly, efficiently, and in a commercially sustainable way.

You’ll manage a team of analysts focused on payments success, routing, and intelligence, delivering clear insights that help us optimise cost, reliability, and scalability. You’ll set the standards for monitoring and diagnosis, identify the drivers of payment performance shifts, and shape how we evaluate and implement changes across our payments systems. This role is ideal for someone who thrives at the intersection of data, systems thinking, and commercial impact.

Domain expertise in payments is a plus, but not required. What matters most is a strong analytical foundation, commercial mindset, and the ability to learn quickly.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the design and maintenance of Cleo’s payments analytics framework, including success rates, latency, cost per transaction, recovery rates, and vendor performance.
• Own and maintain dashboards and alerts for early detection of anomalies in payment success, routing, or infrastructure stability.
• Ensure definitions, thresholds, and escalation processes are consistent, documented, and aligned across the business.
• Detect and diagnose feature shift or concept drift in payments routing models
• Lead investigations into deviations in success or cost, distinguishing between model-driven, operational, and external causes.
• Lead root cause analysis for deteriorations in payment success, latency, or cost efficiency.
• Quantify the commercial impact of new or changing payments features, vendors, or retry strategies.
• Produce monthly forecasts for payment costs, success rates, and vendor throughput, in collaboration with Finance.
• Build scenario models for vendor changes, volume spikes, and product roadmap shifts.
• Conduct variance analysis comparing actuals vs forecast, with clear attribution of differences.
• Manage and mentor payments analysts, setting clear priorities and deliverables.
• Translate complex analytical findings into clear business implications for senior leadership.
• Build strong cross-functional relationships with Engineering, Product, Data Science, Commercial, and Finance.

What We're Looking For

Experience & Skills

• Strong analytical skills with fluency in SQL; experience with Python or R is a plus.
• Ability to interpret and communicate model performance metrics, feature importance, and confidence intervals.
• Background in collaborating with data science or engineering teams on feature engineering and model evaluation.
• Experience building and maintaining monitoring systems and alerting frameworks.
• Commercially minded: able to translate payments success metrics into company-level impact.
• Comfortable learning new domains quickly and navigating complex, interconnected systems.

Leadership & Influence

• Experience managing or mentoring analysts and structuring team output for maximum impact.
• Skilled at turning technical analytics into actionable recommendations for senior stakeholders.
• Able to balance urgent monitoring needs with long-term framework and optimisation work.

Nice To Have

• Familiarity with payments infrastructure, PSPs, or reconciliation processes.
• Experience working with multiple vendors and payment rails.
• Exposure to fintech operations in both the UK and US.

Benefits & Working Style

• A competitive compensation package (base + equity) with bi-annual reviews, aligned to quarterly OKR planning cycles.
• Work at a fast-growing tech startup backed by top VC firms, Balderton & EQT Ventures.
• A clear progression plan with support for growth and impact.
• Flexibility and a globally distributed team; hybrid options in London with occasional in-office days, and travel coverage.
• Other benefits include private medical insurance, pension, 25 days annual leave (+ holidays), sabbatical after 4 years, and more.

Welcoming Everyone

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your situation, please let us know.

Legal & Privacy Note

By submitting this application, you confirm that all information is true to the best of your knowledge and that you have not wilfully suppressed any material fact. Your personal data will be processed in accordance with Cleo's Candidate Privacy Notice.