Lead Product Manager - Ledger

Cardless; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health benefits

Dependent coverage

Catered lunches

Commuter benefit

Parental leave

Team building events

Flexible PTO

Apple equipment

401k

Job summary

Cardless, headquartered in San Francisco, seeks a Senior Product Manager to own the ledger and drive scalable financial infrastructure. You will partner with engineering to design data models, transaction lifecycles, and robust controls across money movement in a fast-growing fintech environment.

You will lead the ledger roadmap, work closely with partners, and advance automated reconciliation and auditing capabilities while maintaining precision and compliance.

Qualifications

• Led or owned a ledger, core banking system, or issuing processor.
• Deep collaboration with engineers on data models and transaction lifecycles.
• Ability to reason about risk, finance, operations, and compliance in ledger decisions.

Responsibilities

• Own the ledger vision and roadmap, set priorities as we scale.
• Define money movement recording, including authorizations, holds, settlements.
• Ensure ledger as trusted source with reconciliation and controls.
• Make ledger a shared foundation across products and partners.
• Collaborate with engineering on stack interactions and data flow.
• Build automated finance operations, improve reconciliation and anomaly detection.
• Work with processors and bank partners on integrations.

Skills

Ledger ownership

Data models

Transaction lifecycles

System boundaries

Risk & compliance

Auditability

Job description

About Cardless

Cardless is building the infrastructure for the world's best companies to design, build, and launch financial products of their own. 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

The ledger sits at the heart of Cardless's financial infrastructure. It is the source of truth for every transaction and balance, and a critical foundation for how we launch and scale financial products. We're looking for a Senior Product Manager to own this area and help us build for the scale and complexity ahead.

What you’ll do

• Own the vision and roadmap for Cardless's ledger, set priorities, and make the trade-offs needed to support the business as we scale.
• Define how money movement is recorded, including authorizations, holds, settlements, reversals, refunds, disputes, fees, and payments across credit and debit.
• Ensure the ledger is a trusted source of truth, with the controls and reconciliation needed to keep balances complete and accurate.
• Make the ledger a shared foundation across products and partners, so we can add new products and money-movement types without rebuilding the underlying accounting logic.
• Partner deeply with engineering on the ledger design and how it interacts with the rest of the stack, from data models and system boundaries to how transactions flow across authorization, payments, disputes, risk, and finance, and how we handle failures and consistency.
• Ensure the ledger scales reliably with the business, with clear financial state, end-to-end traceability, and the tooling needed to investigate and resolve issues quickly.
• Build toward automated financial operations, using automation to improve reconciliation, balance validation, anomaly detection, and exception handling while keeping the right controls in place.
• Work closely with processors and bank partners on the systems and integrations that connect into the ledger.

Who you are

• You’ve built or owned a ledger, core banking system, or issuing processor at a bank, neobank, processor, or BaaS platform.
• You’re excited about how AI and automation can change financial infrastructure, from how financial operations are run to how teams investigate issues, reconcile accounts, and manage exceptions.
• You’re technically strong and comfortable going deep with engineers on data models, transaction lifecycles, system boundaries, failure modes, and the edge cases that come with moving money.
• You think in systems and understand how ledger decisions affect risk, finance, operations, compliance, and the customer experience.
• You understand how infrastructure decisions translate into better products, and you can solve today’s needs while building capabilities we can expand over time.
• You understand the rigor that comes with building systems that move and account for money. You don’t trade accuracy, reliability, controls, and auditability for speed.

Compensation

This role has an annual starting salary range of $200,000–$250,000 + equity + benefits. 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. This role is in-office 5 days a week.