Director, Product - Payments Analytics & Data Decisioning

Director, Product - Payments Analytics & Data Decisioning - New York, NY, Austin, TX or Denver, CO

Are you customer obsessed and passionate about building products and experiences that support the financial needs of a global population? How about offering up your technical skills in a business that is committed to moving money for better? If you are interested in joining a globally diverse organization where our high impact contributions are recognized and celebrated both by our customers and our leadership, allowing each of us to thrive, then it is time to join our Payments Product Team at Western Union. 

Western Union powers your pursuit

We are seeking a strategic and technically strong Director, Payments Analytics & Decisioning to lead the development of advanced data capabilities that power smarter, faster, and more reliable payment decisions across our global remittance platform.

This role is central to shaping how we use data to optimize payment performance—maximizing approval rates, reducing costs, and improving user experience. You will lead a team that builds predictive models, analyzes transaction-level data, and enables data-informed product decisions at scale.

Role Responsibilities:

Analytics & Optimization

• Own analytics strategy and insights for global payments performance, including success rates, cost per transaction, partner performance, and operational efficiency.

• Lead data-driven experimentation and optimization efforts related to payment method selection, routing, retry strategies, and settlement flows.

• Develop dashboards and frameworks to track KPIs, support product and finance decisions, and monitor trends across markets.

Decision Science & Modeling

• Build and deploy models that inform routing, retry logic, and payment prioritization based on factors such as cost, speed, method availability, and past performance.

• Design decisioning frameworks that use transaction-level intelligence to optimize throughput and customer outcomes.

• Partner with Product and Engineering (and Chief Data Officer function) to integrate models and business rules into real-time decisioning infrastructure.

Data Foundations & Infrastructure

• Define the data architecture and requirements to enable comprehensive, accurate, and scalable payments data pipelines.

• Work with Data Engineering to ensure high-quality structured datasets that power both real-time and offline analytics.

• Establish a unified data model across payment types (cards, bank transfers, wallets, etc.) and regions.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Act as the primary data science partner to the Payments Product team, contributing to roadmap planning and product strategy.

• Collaborate with Engineering, Operations, Finance, and Partner Management to align insights with business goals.

• Build, manage, and mentor a team of data scientists and analysts focused on payment analytics.

Role Requirements: 

Required:

• 8+ years of experience in data science or advanced analytics, with at least 3 years in a leadership capacity.

• Deep knowledge of the payments ecosystem—cards, bank transfers, real-time payments, wallets, and alternative payment methods.

• Strong SQL and Python skills, with hands-on experience in predictive modeling, experimentation, and A/B testing.

• Demonstrated ability to deliver measurable impact through data in large-scale, global product or platform environments.

• Exceptional communication skills and comfort working across technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred:

• Experience with remittances, cross-border payments, or multi-region payment platforms.

• Familiarity with the economics and mechanics of payment processing (authorization flows, success rate drivers, cost levers).

• Experience with modern data tooling (e.g., Snowflake, dbt, Bedrock/ Dataiku/ other ML Platforms, Airflow, Looker, Mode).

• Advanced degree (MS/PhD) in Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science, Economics, or related quantitative field.