At Cardless, we’re building a credit card and loyalty platform that consumer businesses use to engage their customers. We’ve launched 14 credit cards, including for Coinbase, Alibaba, and Qatar Airways. We help businesses bring imaginative card programs to life, and have pioneered technology to embed credit card features natively into their products.
We value curiosity, humility, and intensity — we move fast and take ownership. This is a place where a motivated, resourceful individual can have an enormous impact on our trajectory. We're headquartered in San Francisco, and have raised about $90M in equity funding from top venture capital firms and angels.
The Job
We're looking for a Credit Risk Strategy Manager or Senior Manager to own the credit strategy for managing risk across our existing cardholder portfolio. This is a highly analytical, strategy-forward role focused on building the decisioning framework that determines how we extend additional credit, manage exposure, and optimize portfolio performance as well as ensuring the tools, data, and processes behind those decisions are best-in-class.
Reporting to our Head of Credit, you'll work at the intersection of data, tooling, and operations to optimize customer-level credit decisions as Cardless scales. You'll own the strategy for actions such as credit line increases and decreases, balance transfer offers, and other portfolio management levers, while building the measurement infrastructure needed to continuously improve performance for a rapidly growing portfolio.
What You'll Own
Portfolio Strategy & Signal Development
Define the logic and thresholds for credit line increases, decreases, and exposure management — balancing portfolio growth, credit risk, and customer experience
Develop the strategy and implementation for new programs such as balance transfers and ongoing spend campaigns
Build structured feedback loops between portfolio performance and policy triggers to drive continuous refinement
Develop processes for loss forecasting, leading edge delinquencies, and other methods to understand future portfolio performance
Build and maintain automated dashboards to track key performance indicators (KPIs) around portfolio performance
Design and execute A/B tests to evaluate new strategies, balancing product performance with customer and partner satisfaction
Cross-Functional Partnership
Partner with Data Science to define feature requirements, evaluate model performance, and translate model outputs into operational policy
Partner with engineering to build and implement new strategies such as proactive credit line increase execution and reactive credit line increase APIs
Work with Compliance and Legal to ensure portfolio management policies comply with ECOA, FCRA, Fair Lending, and other applicable regulations
Work together with brand partners to balance company and partner goals and share out performance and results
Work with bank partners to document, present and get approval for new policies/models
What We're Looking For
5–10 years of experience in credit risk strategy, portfolio management, or underwriting at a financial institution, fintech, or payments company.
Deep expertise in consumer credit portfolio management – experience with credit line management, utilization dynamics, and loss forecasting is a plus
Experience leveraging behavioral and bureau data to develop/optimize strategies
Strong SQL skills and experience using analytics to build and evaluate credit strategies, track portfolio performance, and identify emerging risk patterns.
Familiarity working with credit risk models (including regression and tree-based machine learning) and decision engines in a production environment.
Excellent communication skills — you can translate complex credit tradeoffs into clear recommendations for executives, partners, and compliance teams
Proactive, bias-to-action mindset: you ask the right questions, align stakeholders, and drive decisions forward.
Compensation
This role has an annual starting salary range of $150,000 - $210,000 + equity + benefits (see below). Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors, including but not limited to skills, experience, and specific work location.
Benefits
We're headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with a beautiful office in the Mission District. We're proud to offer our team excellent benefits:
💸 Meaningful Start-up equity
🏥 100% health, vision & dental primary coverage
➕ 75% health, vision & dental dependent coverage
🍱 Catered lunches
🚎 $250/month Commuter benefit
👶 Parental leave
✈️ Team building events & happy hours
🌴 Flexible PTO with a minimum of 15 days off per year
🖥️ Apple equipment
💸 401k plan
Location
We're headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with a beautiful office in the Financial District. We welcome employees who want to work from this office; we offer additional benefits to those who do, and relocation assistance to those who'd like to.
We regularly bring our team together for offsites & trips, about every 2 months, both for fun and for work. We cover all travel & lodging in these cases.