Fraud Strategy Manager / Senior Manager (Onboarding)

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

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful Start-up equity

100% health, vision & dental coverage

75% dependent coverage for health/vis?

Catered lunches

$250/month Commuter benefit

Parental leave

Team building events & happy hours

Flexible PTO 15+ days

Apple equipment

401k plan

Job summary

Cardless is seeking a Fraud Strategy Manager or Senior Manager – Onboarding to lead onboarding fraud strategy. You will design decisioning, own the manual review program, and build the data and signals framework with device intelligence and partner data.

This role reports to the Chief Risk Officer and partners with Product, Engineering, Compliance and Operations. Ideal candidates have 5–10 years in fraud/identity risk in fintech or payments, strong SQL and excellent communication skills to

Qualifications

• 5–10 years of experience in fraud strategy, identity risk or credit risk at a financial institution, fintech or payments company.
• Deep expertise in onboarding fraud — synthetic identities, identity manipulation, first-party fraud vectors and deposit/funding fraud.
• Hands-on experience with bank data providers in a fraud or credit risk context.
• Familiarity with device intelligence and behavioral fraud platforms.
• Strong SQL skills and experience using data to build and evaluate fraud rules, track performance and identify emerging patterns.
• Excellent communication skills — you can translate complex fraud 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.

Responsibilities

• Define the end-to-end fraud strategy for onboarding, including decisioning and review processes.
• Own manual review program: queue prioritization, SLA design, analyst tooling and escalation paths.
• Evaluate tools and identify gaps to enable faster, higher-quality decisions.
• Track outcomes: decisions, rates, reversals, downstream fraud and false positives.
• Build feedback loops between review outcomes and upstream rules to refine policy.
• Lead data-driven data-signal development with alternative data, device intelligence and partner sources.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Compliance and Ops to implement policy in systems.

Skills

Fraud strategy

Identity risk

Credit risk

SQL

Data interpretation

Communication

Decision making

Job description

About Cardless

Cardless is building the infrastructure for the world's best companies to design, build, and launch financial products. Companies like Coinbase and Bilt use Cardless to create credit cards that feel entirely their own. In an industry where branded financial products usually mean shared logos and shared control, Cardless is built to disappear. Our APIs and components shape the journey from the first application to every purchase, reward and moment of support that follows, while we handle lending, compliance and operations behind the scenes.

In September 2025, we raised a $60 million Series C led by Spark Capital, bringing our total funding to $170 million. The team is over 70 people and scaling toward profitability by year-end 2026. We’re looking for kind, humble people with high standards and low egos. We take the work seriously without taking ourselves too seriously. We see what could be improved, make it so, and leave every product, system and team better than we found it.

About The Role

We're looking for a Fraud Strategy Manager or Senior Manager – Onboarding to own the end-to-end fraud strategy for how we evaluate new applicants. This is a highly analytical, strategy-forward role focused on building the decisioning framework that determines which applicants are approved, stepped up for review, or declined, and making sure the tools, data and processes behind those decisions are best-in-class.

Reporting to our Chief Risk Officer, you'll work at the intersection of data, tooling and operations to sharpen our onboarding defenses as Cardless scales in the next year. You'll own the manual review program, drive the strategy for leveraging alternative data signals from bank data, device intelligence and partner sources, and build the measurement infrastructure to continuously improve performance.

Manual Review Strategy & Operations

• Define the logic and thresholds for routing applicants into manual review, balancing fraud risk against approval rates and customer experience.
• Own the manual review program end-to-end: queue prioritization, SLA design, analyst tooling and case escalation paths.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of tools used in manual review; identify gaps and advocate for new capabilities that help analysts make faster, higher-quality decisions.
• Track manual review outcomes rigorously: analyst decisions, approval/decline rates, reversal rates, downstream fraud on reviewed accounts and false positive costs.
• Build structured feedback loops between review outcomes and upstream rules triggers to drive continuous policy refinement.

Alternative Data & Signal Development

• Lead the strategy for incorporating bank account data into onboarding decisions, leveraging signals such as account tenure, balance history, income patterns and return/NSF activity.
• Operationalize device intelligence and behavioral signals to strengthen identity and fraud detection at the top of the funnel.
• Develop a framework for using partner data: loyalty engagement, transaction history, tenure signals as supplementary fraud indicators in co-brand card programs.
• Evaluate new data sources and vendors on an ongoing basis; build a rigorous test-and-learn methodology to validate signal lift before production deployment.

Fraud Detection & Rules Ownership

• Own the fraud rules framework for onboarding: design, test, implement and continuously tune rules across identity, velocity, device, funding and behavioral dimensions.
• Partner with data science to define feature requirements, evaluate model performance and translate model outputs into operational policy.
• Document all policy decisions clearly, including the tradeoffs made at each threshold.

Performance Measurement & Portfolio Monitoring

• Define and own the KPI framework for onboarding fraud: fraud rate by vintage and partner, manual review rate, auto-decisioned bad rate, tool efficacy and cost-per-review.
• Conduct regular portfolio reviews to surface emerging fraud patterns, track loss trends and assess detection performance.
• Build reporting to enable real-time monitoring, trend identification and rapid policy response.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner with Product and Engineering to translate fraud strategy into system requirements and influence roadmap prioritization.
• Work with Compliance and Legal to ensure onboarding controls meet BSA/AML, Red Flags Rule, ECOA and UDAAP requirements.
• Collaborate with Customer Operations to manage edge cases, decision appeals and applicant escalations.

What We're Looking For

• 5–10 years of experience in fraud strategy, identity risk or credit risk at a financial institution, fintech or payments company.
• Deep expertise in onboarding fraud — synthetic identities, identity manipulation, first-party fraud vectors and deposit/funding fraud.
• Hands‑on experience with bank data providers in a fraud or credit risk context.
• Familiarity with device intelligence and behavioral fraud platforms.
• Strong SQL skills and experience using data to build and evaluate fraud rules, track performance and identify emerging patterns.
• Excellent communication skills — you can translate complex fraud 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

• 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 Jackson Square. We’re in the office at least three days a week, and most of us are there more than that, because we do our best thinking and building together in person. We’re looking for someone who’s genuinely excited to be there alongside the team.