Operations Manager - Permanent Contract

The company 🏢

Aria is a leading payment infrastructure platform designed for B2B software applications, enabling seamless integration of invoice payment features into their products. Our solution is integrated with the most popular transactional tools and marketplaces, facilitating daily transactions between buyers and suppliers. Our primary mission is to accelerate invoice payments by enhancing the payment experience and, in most cases, providing upfront funding.

The role 🥷

As Operations Manager, you will lead Aria's Finance Operations team of 6 (currently 2 debt collection agents and 4 FinOps agents), owning the operational integrity of the full loan lifecycle, from origination through repayment and, where needed, insurance recovery.

This role reports directly to the Finance Director, who in turn reports to the CFO.

This is not a caretaker role. We need a manager who treats the team's workflows as a product to be continuously redesigned, not a process to be merely supervised. You will be measured as much on how much manual work you remove from the team through automation and AI as on day-to-day operational performance.

Why this role matters ? Today, this team's processes are largely manual and reactive. We need someone who will proactively rebuild them, using AI and automation as a first resort, not something they wait on product or engineering to deliver.

What You'll Own: The Loan Lifecycle 🔄

You will be responsible for operational excellence across every stage of the loan lifecycle, and for building the team's capability to manage each stage with less manual intervention over time.

1. Origination & Acceptance

• Oversee validation and acceptance of new loans, and resolve blocked loans arising from credit limit

breaches, debtor issues, or partner-level problems.

• Ensure fast, accurate escalation to Risk & Compliance where acceptance decisions require judgment beyond the team's mandate.

2. Trust / Vehicle Allocation

• Supervise the allocation of accepted loans to the correct funding vehicle (FCT, fiducie, or on-balance-sheet), and manage reallocation when a vehicle has insufficient funds or other allocation issues block payout.
• Work with Finance and Capital Markets to keep allocation logic aligned with each vehicle's funding constraints.

3. Payout & Collections

• Oversee loan payout to the debtor, and ownership of the collections process once a debtor falls delinquent, from first payment demand through escalated collection steps.
• Manage the interface with our credit insurer for claims on bad debt, including preparing and submitting claims, and managing the reimbursement process to the insurer when a debtor pays after an indemnification has already been made.

4. Repayment & Lettering

• Own the reconciliation ("lettering") of incoming repayments against specific loans, a manual, judgment-heavy process today, and a top target for automation. This step is what allows loans to be correctly marked as repaid and funds to flow back to the correct vehicle.

5. Ongoing Operational Issues

• Resolve incorrect credit limits, missing or incomplete KYC/KYB information, and other data quality issues that block operations.
• Act as the operational hub between FinOps, Finance, Risk & Compliance, and the KAM team, ensuring issues are resolved quickly and don't recur.

Your Main Missions 🎯

● Lead Daily Operations: Supervise the full loan lifecycle described above, including receivable validation, vehicle allocation, payment management, collections, and insurer relations.

● Drive Process Improvement Through AI: This is the single most important part of the role. Identify manual, repetitive, or error-prone steps in the team's workflows yourself, and take the initiative to design and implement AI-driven or automated solutions, working directly with Engineering and Product rather than waiting on their roadmap.

● Define and Own Team KPIs: Establish the KPIs this team should be measured on (processing times, error rates, collection rates, recovery rates, lettering turnaround, customer satisfaction, etc.), a foundation that does not exist properly today, and use them to drive measurable performance improvement.

● Team Management: Lead, train, and performance-manage a team of 6 (2 debt collection agents, 4 FinOps agents), holding the team to a high and rising performance bar.

● Cross-functional Collaboration: Work closely with Tech, Product, Risk, Compliance, Finance, and KAM to resolve bottlenecks and to scope and prioritise automation opportunities.

● Operational Reporting: Report KPI performance and improvement initiatives to senior management on a regular cadence.

● Crisis & Escalation Management: Intervene quickly on payment delays, client disputes, and other escalations.

Who you are 🫵🏻

Experience

● 5–7 years in an equivalent operations role, ideally within a fintech, factoring, receivables, or lending business.

● Demonstrated experience managing a team (ideally 5+ people) in an operational, process-driven environment.

● Track record of having personally driven a process improvement or automation initiative, not just having asked for one. This is a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have.

● Comfortable using AI tools (LLM-based workflow automation, AI agents, no-code/low-code tooling, or similar) to solve operational problems directly, without needing engineering to build a full product feature first.

● Fluent English and French required, given day-to-day collaboration across the business.

Soft Skills

● Self-Starter, Not a Caretaker: Actively hunts for inefficiency rather than waiting to be told where it is. This is the single biggest differentiator we're hiring for.

● Rigour & Organisation: Able to prioritise and manage multiple files simultaneously.

● Analytical Thinking & Problem Solving: Diagnoses root causes and proposes pragmatic, often technical, solutions.

● Autonomy & Proactivity: Takes initiative in a dynamic, still-scaling environment.

● Excellent Communication: Comfortable interacting with agents, senior management, engineering, and external partners (insurer, funders).

● Adaptability: Integrates quickly and handles the unexpected.

Key Technical Competencies

● Excellent understanding of receivables assignment mechanisms (factoring) across the full loan lifecycle: origination, funding vehicle allocation, payout, collections, and reconciliation.

● Solid B2B credit culture.

● Strong knowledge of credit insurance: limits, monitoring, deadlines, exclusions, claims, and indemnification/reimbursement flows.

● Ability to analyse contractual and funding-vehicle structures (FCT, fiducie, on-balance-sheet).

● Strong data-driven mindset; able to define KPIs from scratch and instrument them.

● Practical fluency with AI-based workflow tools, sufficient to scope, prototype, or directly implement automation without waiting for a full product build.

● Ability to challenge the business constructively.

Leadership Qualities

● Critical and independent thinker who sets a higher bar than "the team is doing its job."

● Decisive arbitration and decision-making skills.

● Natural leadership, with the credibility to push a team to perform better, not just to keep the lights on.

● Ability to structure processes in an environment that is still scaling, and to redesign them as the business changes.

● Comfortable in a demanding, fast-growing environment.

What We Offer & Our benefits 🎁 🤝

• Impact: A key role in a high-growth Fintech
• Flexibility: A remote-friendly culture
• Environment: Beautiful offices in the heart of Paris
• Meal vouchers via "Swile" worth €11,10 per day.
• Bike subscription : Coverage for your bike subscription (or public transport) and access to private parking.
• Health insurance : 100% coverage of family
• Fruit delivery : Weekly delivery of fresh, seasonal, and locally sourced fruits.

Interview Process 🤝

• HR Interview
• Manager interview, our Financial Director
• Use case with the manager and the CFO
• Coffee fit + CEO chat

Aria is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees, including those with disabilities.