Payment Operations Manager

Cardless; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Startup equity

100% health, vision & dental coverage

Catered lunches

Commuter benefit

Flexible PTO

Job summary

A fintech innovator in San Francisco is seeking a Payments Operations Manager to oversee and enhance their card operations. The successful candidate will leverage their extensive payment operations experience and strong SQL skills to improve workflows and processes within a dynamic environment. This position is in-office five days a week and offers a competitive salary of $150,000–$180,000 annually, along with significant equity and comprehensive benefits.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in payment or card operations (issuer, processor, or fintech).
• Experience with card processors and reconciliation.
• Knowledge of BINs and card lifecycle operations.

Responsibilities

• Own the automation of the card lifecycle workflows end-to-end.
• Support scaling external partnerships while establishing SOPs.
• Build internal ops dashboards for real-time visibility.

Skills

Payment operations experience

Strong SQL

Automation tooling

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 hiring a Payments Operations Manager to scale and operate the infrastructure behind Cardless’s card programs.

This individual contributor role sits at the center of our payments ecosystem. Working with our key operational systems, managing external partners (processors, issuing banks, networks), and driving high-impact initiatives like processor integrations, program launches, and process improvements.

You’ll balance hands‑on operational execution with program‑level ownership, ensuring our payments systems are reliable, scalable, and ready to support new products and partners. You’ll identify the highest‑leverage opportunities to automate, build the tooling (or spec it for engineering), and make sure our ops team can support 10x the volume without 10x the headcount.

Before You Apply

A few things worth knowing:

• This is an IC role. You won’t have direct reports. You’ll be a high performing individual contributor embedded in a small, high‑output payment ops team.

• We work in the office 5 days a week. We know that’s a dealbreaker for some people, and that’s okay.

• We move fast and operate with imperfect information. If you prefer fully defined problems and complete context before acting, this role may not be the right fit.

• Fintech complexity is real. Credit cards sit at the intersection of product, compliance, fraud, and banking. You'll need to get fluent quickly and build that fluency into everything you create.

If that sounds like your kind of work, keep reading.

Impactful Role Scope & Responsibilities

You’ll work on programs people care about. Coinbase. Bilt. Qatar Airways. These aren’t test programs. They’re products with real cardholders and real transaction volume.

• Reimagine how we onboard and operate. You will own the automation of the card lifecycle workflows end‑to‑end by spotting manual pain points, designing smarter solutions, and partnering with Engineering to bring them to life.

• Get close to the product and build cards people love, improving operations and strengthening partnerships to make great credit card experiences possible.

This role is about scale. Drive the scale of Cardless payment operations by building processes and systems that handle growing complexity and volume seamlessly as we expand to millions of cardholders.

• Working directly in the payment operations world and analyzing tickets to uncover root causes and drive fixes that solve underlying problems, not just surface issues.

• Operationalizing network mandates.Build intake and tracking processes, assessing impact, and coordinating implementation across Ops and Engineering to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

• Support the BPO and back‑office operations strategy—scaling external partnerships while establishing SOPs, training and audit frameworks to ensure quality and consistency.

You’ll be on the frontier of AI and automation in payments. Exception handling, reconciliation and monitoring are some of the highest‑leveraged areas in fintech today, and you’ll be building those systems, not watching from the sidelines.

• Build internal ops dashboards. Scope and deliver a unified view of card production, transaction exceptions, inventory levels and processor health—giving the team real‑time visibility without relying on Engineering.

• Leverage AI to design and evolve processes, SOPs, and tooling to eliminate manual work while improving reliability, and enabling real‑time monitoring and reporting.

Requirements

• 5+ years in payment or card operations (issuer, processor, or fintech)

• Experience with card processors, reconciliation, and network file formats (Visa, Mastercard, Amex)

• Strong SQL and comfort using data to diagnose issues and validate solutions

• Experience building or improving operational tooling and automation

• Knowledge of network mandates, BINs, and card lifecycle operations

• Clear communicator across teams

• Comfortable in fast‑moving, ambiguous environments; fintech experience is a plus

Compensation

The expected cash compensation for this role is $150,000–$180,000 annually, plus equity and benefits. Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skills, experience, and specific work location.

Benefits

We’re proud to offer our team excellent benefits:

💸 Meaningful startup 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. This role is in‑office 5 days a week.