Credit Risk Strategy Manager / Senior Manager

Cardless; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful Start-up equity

100% health coverage

75% dependent coverage

Catered lunches

$250/month Commuter benefit

Parental leave

Team building events

Flexible PTO

Apple equipment

401k plan

Job summary

A financial technology company in San Francisco is seeking a Credit Risk Strategy Manager to oversee the credit strategy for managing risk across its portfolio. This analytical role requires expertise in credit risk, portfolio management, and strong SQL skills to optimize decision-making as the company scales. Successful candidates will have 5–10 years of relevant experience, a proactive mindset, and the ability to communicate complex strategies clearly. The role offers a competitive salary range of $150,000 - $210,000 plus benefits.

Qualifications

• 5–10 years of experience in credit risk strategy or portfolio management.
• Deep expertise in consumer credit portfolio management.
• Strong SQL skills for building and evaluating credit strategies.

Responsibilities

• Define logic for credit line increases and exposure management.
• Build automated dashboards to track key performance indicators.
• Partner with Data Science to define feature requirements.

Skills

Credit risk strategy

Portfolio management

SQL

Communication skills

Job description

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.