Head of Professional Services Excellence

Adyen is hiring a Head of Professional Services Excellence to lead a small, transformative team within Professional Services.

This is Adyen

Adyen provides payments, data, and financial products in a single solution for customers like Meta, Uber, H&M, and Microsoft - making us the financial technology platform of choice. At Adyen, everything we do is engineered for ambition.

For our teams, we create an environment with opportunities for our people to succeed, backed by the culture and support to ensure they are enabled to truly own their careers. We are motivated individuals who tackle unique technical challenges at scale and solve them as a team. Together, we deliver innovative and ethical solutions that help businesses achieve their ambitions faster.

About the Professional Service Excellence team

We are looking for an experienced leader to join us as Head of Professional Services Excellence, to lead a small, but transformative team. This newly formed team is responsible for driving continuous improvement across Professional Services, strengthening how we operate, how we scale, and how we serve our customers. The initial team will consist of 6 to 9 individual contributors.

Professional Services (PS) plays a critical role in enabling Adyen’s growth, but as we’ve scaled, so have complexity, friction, and operational challenges. The PS Excellence team exists to address this head-on: raising the bar on operational excellence, improving merchant experience, reducing friction across workflows, and building the capabilities and systems that allow PS to operate at a high standard, consistently and at scale.

This team will act as a force multiplier for the wider PS organisation: bringing structure, execution muscle, and operational rigor to our most important improvement areas while working closely with domain leaders, Product, and Operations. The Head of PS Excellence will play a key role in shaping how Professional Services evolves, matures, and delivers impact over the coming years.

This position can be based in our Chicago, New York, or Amsterdam office.

About the Role: Your Impact, and What You’ll Do:

Leadership and Vision:

• Set the vision, strategy, and priorities for the PS Excellence team, aligned with PS, OPS and company-level objectives
• Operate as a peer to the PS leadership team, helping develop and operationalize the Professional Services strategy by translating high-level ambition into a clear roadmap of initiatives and capabilities
• Act as a thought partner to the VP of PS and your peers on how PS should scale, mature, and operate

Drive Operational Excellence & Change at Scale

• Own the portfolio of PS-wide initiatives that improve how we operate (processes, tooling, ways of working, service models)
• Ensure initiatives are well-defined, well-prioritized, and actually delivered, partnering closely with domain leaders to embed changes into day-to-day operations
• Drive a step-change in operational excellence across PS with a clear focus on improving the merchant experience, reducing friction across workflows, and increasing consistency in PS delivery
• Own the structure, planning cycles, and operating rhythms for key PS-wide initiatives

Build & Lead a High-Performing Team

• Build and lead a high-performing team with clear ownership, strong collaboration, and high accountability
• Operate as a senior leader in the PS and OPS ecosystem, partnering closely with domain leaders and other cross functional stakeholders
• Create organizational structure, reduce complexity, and enable your team to navigate ambiguity in a fast-changing environment

Who you are

• You are a visible, senior leader who brings structure, calm, and direction in ambiguous, fast-changing environments. You are comfortable operating as a peer to other senior leaders and influencing at all levels of the organization.
• You have demonstrated experience developing a high performing geographically distributed team, demonstrating you can lead effectively in a remote setting
• You lead by example with a hands-on approach. Rolling up your sleeves to design scalable initiatives and effectively implementing new or revised operational models
• An excellent communicator who builds trust and alignment with peers, cross-functional partners, and senior stakeholders
• You are a strong operator who cares about how the organisation actually runs and holds a high bar on quality, consistency, and scalability
• You demonstrate long-term thinking and have the ability to connect tactical decisions to long-term strategy and think several moves ahead
• Low-ego, pragmatic, and impact-driven, focused on making the organisation work better

The Adyen Formula

The way we work is guided by the eight principles of the Adyen Formula.