Payments Performance Director

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 lifecycles, 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 improvements, design rigorous experiments, and balance Member experience, revenue, fraud risk, and payment economics.

How You’ll be Rewarded:

At CLEAR, we help YOU move forward - because when you’re at your best, we’re at our best. You’ll work with talented team members motivated by our mission of making experiences safer and easier. Our offices are bright and energetic with an open concept and plenty of conference rooms and casual co-working spaces. We also offer catered lunches every day and have fully stocked kitchens. Outside of the office, we invest in your well-being and learning & development with stipends and reimbursement programs. 

We offer holistic total rewards, including comprehensive healthcare plans, family-building benefits (fertility and adoption/surrogacy support), flexible time off, annual wellness stipend, free OneMedical memberships for you and your dependents, a CLEAR Plus membership, and a 401(k) retirement plan with employer match. The base salary range for this role is $234,000 – $275,000 depending on levels of skills and experience.

This total compensation range includes base salary, annual bonus incentive, and new hire equity package (in Restricted Stock Units) for this position at CLEAR. Additionally, this role will be eligible for refresh equity grants as part of our ongoing compensation program. Actual compensation will vary based on factors including, but not limited to, location, education, skills, experience, and performance. All stock based compensation will be subject to the terms and conditions of applicable agreements.

Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or other characteristics protected by law.

CLEAR provides reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities or protected needs. Please let us know if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job or perform your job. Examples of reasonable accommodation include, but are not limited to, time off, extra breaks, making a change to the application process or work procedures, policy exceptions, providing documents in an alternative format, live captioning or using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.

We are committed to a transparent and secure hiring process. All communications related to this role will come directly from a CLEAR employee through valid CLEAR channels (e.g., a valid @clearme.com email address or verified CLEAR LinkedIn profile). We encourage candidates to remain alert to job scams and to report any suspicious activity.