Credit Risk Strategy Manager / Senior Manager

Cardless

San Francisco, California

JOB DETAILS
SKILLS
A/B Testing, Analysis Skills, Apple, Application Programming Interface (API), Campaigns, Communication Skills, Consumer Loans, Continuous Improvement, Credit Cards, Credit Risk, Cross-Functional, Customer Experience, Customer Satisfaction, Data Science, Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), Fair Lending, Forecasting, Funding, Investment Management, Machine Learning, Machine Tool, Past Due Accounts, Performance Analysis, Performance Management, Performance Metrics, Performance Modeling, Performance Tuning/Optimization, Process Development, Production Systems, Regulations, Regulatory Compliance, Reporting Dashboards, Requirements Management, Risk Analysis, Risk Management, Risk Modeling, SQL (Structured Query Language), Strategic Planning, Underwriting, Venture Capital
LOCATION
San Francisco, California
POSTED
30+ days ago

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.

About the Company

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Cardless