The five roles your payments team needs before your first PSP goes live

AfterWorc team · 22 Sept 2026 · 2 min read

Plan operations and reconciliation before go-live, not after.
AML and KYC work starts on day one of real transactions.
One accountable lead keeps integration, operations and compliance aligned.

The integration gets the attention, but the first weeks after go-live decide whether payments run smoothly. These are the roles we staff most often for payments teams at SaaS companies, EMIs and PSPs.

1. Head of Payments (team lead)

Owns the payment stack end to end: providers, routing, costs and incidents. Makes sure engineering, operations and compliance work as one team.

2. Payment Integrations Engineer

Builds and maintains the connections to PSPs and acquirers: payment flows, webhooks, retries, idempotency and settlement files. Knows how to read provider documentation and test edge cases.

3. Payments Operations Specialist

Handles the daily work once money moves: failed payments, refunds, payouts, provider tickets and merchant questions.

4. Reconciliation Analyst

Matches what your system says with what the provider and the bank say. Catches missing settlements and fee differences before they grow.

5. AML / KYC Analyst

Onboards customers, reviews alerts from transaction monitoring and prepares cases. For regulated companies this role is required, not optional.

When to hire them

Before go-live: the lead and the integrations engineer.
At go-live: operations and reconciliation, even part-time.
As volume grows: dedicated AML / KYC capacity and chargeback handling.