Senior Credit Strategy Manager

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

Benefits offered by this job

Start-up equity

Health, vision & dental

Dependent coverage 75%

Catered lunches

Commuter benefit

Parental leave

Team events & happy hours

Flexible PTO

Apple equipment

401k plan

Job summary

Cardless in San Francisco seeks a Senior Credit Strategy Manager to own credit strategy for risk across our cardholder portfolio. This highly analytical role builds the decisioning framework for extending credit and optimizing portfolio performance.

You'll partner with Data Science, Engineering, Compliance, and Brand teams to implement policies, monitor KPIs, and run A/B tests that balance growth with responsible lending.

Qualifications

• 5–10 years of credit risk strategy, portfolio management, or underwriting experience in fintech or financial services.
• Experience using behavioral and bureau data to optimize credit strategies.
• Ability to translate complex tradeoffs into clear executive recommendations.
• Strong SQL and production-grade analytics experience.
• Familiarity with credit risk models (regression/tree-based) and decision engines.

Responsibilities

• Define credit line policy thresholds for increases/decreases and exposure.
• Develop strategies for balance transfers and spend campaigns.
• Build dashboards to monitor KPI trends and portfolio health.
• Lead A/B testing to optimize strategies balancing product and risk.
• Collaborate with Data Science, Engineering, Compliance, and Brand teams.

Skills

Credit risk strategy

Portfolio management

Underwriting

SQL

Behavioral data

Credit risk models

Communication

Bias to action

Regulatory knowledge

Cross-functional collaboration

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 Senior Credit Strategy 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 Do

• 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 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 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.

Cardless is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate against applicants or employees on the basis of any characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.