Payment Integration Specialist

Employer: Thrive Creative Inc.

Engagement: Full time

Location: Remote within Canada

Reports to: Technical Delivery Lead, Thrive Creative Inc.

Time split: Roughly 60% embedded with a client, 40% delivery management across Thrive engagements

About Thrive Creative

Thrive Creative Inc. is an on-demand engineering department. Our clients plug in what they need when they need it, drawing on a network of 50+ specialists: software developers, designers, data and AI specialists, and project leads. We work as a forward deployed team, embedded inside the client’s business rather than sitting outside it as a vendor.

The Shape of the Role

About 60% of your time is spent embedded with one of our clients, an organization that runs donor acquisition and recurring giving programs for charities across Canada and the United States. You are the technical bridge between their nonprofit customers and the development team during payment processor integrations and new customer onboarding. We name the client at first interview.

The other 40% is delivery management across Thrive’s wider client base. You run the planning, backlog, and communication for a set of active engagements alongside the engineers assigned to them

Both halves draw on the same underlying skill, which is turning what a client says into something an engineering team can build against, and turning what engineering needs into a question a client can actually answer.

Embedded Placement Responsibilities

Customer-Facing Integration Support

- Serve as the primary technical point of contact for the client’s nonprofit customers during payment processor transitions and new platform integrations, including Stripe, Fundraise Up, Engaging Networks, BBMS, and Luminate Online.
- Guide those customers through the configuration each integration requires: API key generation, webhook setup, permission grants, test environment activation, and PCI compliance. This happens over screen share, through written documentation, or by direct instruction.
- Triage and resolve the questions that currently stall the integration pipeline, reducing how often developers are pulled into customer-facing communication.
- Prioritize onboarding support for non-hosted, PCI-compatible payment processors, where the configuration requirements are most complex and hands-on guidance matters most.

Developer Liaison and Data Preparation
- Make sure the development team receives complete, accurate, properly formatted data, taking ambiguity and rework out of the handoff.
- Translate developer questions into clear, actionable requests,



and translate the answers back into the technical context the development team needs.
- Coordinate integration timelines against both customer availability and development capacity, flagging blockers before they stall progress.

Process Development and Standardization

- Work with the development team to document and build standard operating procedures for the current landscape of payment processor integrations.
- Develop and maintain onboarding checklists, data collection templates, and configuration guides for each major platform.
- Identify patterns across integrations that point to automation, self-serve tooling, or process simplification.
- Monitor changes to payment platform APIs, admin interfaces, and compliance requirements, and update internal processes to keep pace.

Account and Relationship Support

- Work with account managers and account directors to align integration timelines with campaign launch schedules and customer expectations.
- Join onboarding calls and quarterly reviews where payment processing is on the agenda, providing direct technical context.
- Escalate systemic integration issues when the pattern suggests a customer experience or capacity risk.

Thrive Delivery Responsibilities

- Run delivery on a set of active Thrive engagements: sprint planning, backlog grooming, story pointing, and estimation alongside the engineers assigned to each account.
- Break client requests into epics and user stories with acceptance criteria that hold up under development, so work can be planned and estimated rather than interpreted.
- Own the client communication rhythm on those engagements. Run the recurring check-ins, report progress plainly, and raise scope and timeline changes early rather than at the end of a sprint.
- Track effort against each engagement and flag capacity pressure before it becomes a scheduling problem, in either direction. Our model scales up and down with demand, so both a spike and a lull need to be seen coming.
- Coordinate specialists from our contractor network onto engagements as workload changes, and bring them up to speed on context quickly.
- Keep engagement documentation current so context survives a team change, a scale-up, or a pause.




- Feed recurring delivery problems back into how we work, rather than solving the same one on four accounts in parallel.

Qualifications

Required

- Demonstrated experience with payment processing platforms (Stripe, Fundraise Up, Engaging Networks, BBMS, Luminate Online, or comparable systems) in a configuration, implementation, or technical support capacity.
- Understanding of PCI compliance requirements, particularly as they apply to non-hosted payment processing environments.
- Ability to read and interpret API documentation, configure webhooks, and navigate platform admin interfaces without developer support.
- Experience running software delivery: managing a backlog, planning sprints, and writing user stories and acceptance criteria that an engineering team can work from.
- Strong client-facing communication. You can explain a technical requirement to a non-technical audience clearly and patiently, and you can deliver bad news about a timeline without burying it.
- Comfort managing several concurrent client timelines with minimal supervision, and the judgment to know which one needs you today.

Preferred

- Experience in the nonprofit fundraising sector, particularly with recurring gift programs and donor management systems.
- Familiarity with the CRM platforms common to Canadian and US charities (Raiser’s Edge, Salesforce NPSP, Engaging Networks, Fundraise Up, Evergiving, Made Media).
- Experience working in an agency, consultancy, or embedded delivery model, where the client is not your employer.
- Working knowledge of REST APIs, JSON, and the data formats common to payment and CRM integrations.
- Technical writing experience, producing clear and maintainable process documentation and customer-facing guides.
- Familiarity with delivery tooling such as ClickUp, Jira, or Linear.

How the Role Is Structured

On the embedded side you sit with the client’s client-facing team rather than their technology team, so integration timelines are governed by customer readiness and campaign launch schedules. Onboarding friction is surfaced and resolved by the people closest to the relationship. Technical governance sits with that client’s internal technology group, so the role depends on strong coordination across both.

- Everything else runs through Thrive. Your delivery lead sets priorities across the wider portfolio, handles the split when the two halves compete for the same week, and is the person you escalate to. You are our employee working inside their business, not theirs.

📌 Payment Integration Specialist / PM (Canada)
🏢 THRIVE CREATIVE
📍 Canada