Credit Risk Strategy Manager

About the role

At Cardless, we are constructing a credit card and loyalty platform that consumer businesses use to engage their customers. The Credit Risk Strategy Manager will own the credit strategy for managing risk across our existing cardholder portfolio, ensuring that growth is balanced with disciplined risk management. This role is deeply analytical and strategy-forward, focusing on building the decisioning framework that determines how we extend additional credit, manage exposure, and optimize portfolio performance as Cardless scales. You will define the logic and thresholds for credit line actions, build measurement infrastructure, and partner cross-functionally to ensure policies are robust, compliant, and effective. You are expected to move fast, take ownership, and use curiosity, humility, and intensity to shape how we manage risk in a rapidly evolving portfolio. This is a place where a motivated, resourceful individual can have an enormous impact on our trajectory.

Key facts

What you'll do

You will own the credit strategy for managing risk across Cardless's existing cardholder portfolio and play a central role in how we extend credit and manage exposure as the portfolio scales. This includes defining the logic and thresholds for credit line increases, decreases, and exposure management, balancing portfolio growth, credit risk, and customer experience. You will develop strategy and implementation for new programs such as balance transfers and ongoing spend campaigns, translating business objectives into risk guardrails and operational policies. A core responsibility is building structured feedback loops between portfolio performance and policy triggers to enable continuous refinement of decisioning rules. You will also develop processes for loss forecasting, leading edge delinquencies, and other forward-looking methods to anticipate future portfolio performance.

A significant part of this role involves building and maintaining automated dashboards to track key performance indicators related to portfolio performance, enabling data-driven decisions at every level. You will design and execute A/B tests to evaluate new strategies, balancing product performance with customer and partner satisfaction while actively managing risk. Collaboration with Data Science will be central, as you define feature requirements, evaluate model performance, and translate model outputs into scalable operational policies. You will partner with engineering to build and implement new strategies, such as proactive credit line increase execution and reactive credit line increase APIs, ensuring reliability, performance, and scalability. You will also work closely with Compliance and Legal to ensure all portfolio management policies adhere to ECOA, FCRA, Fair Lending, and other applicable regulations. In addition, you will collaborate with brand partners to balance company and partner goals, sharing performance insights and aligning on strategy to protect portfolio health. You will work with bank partners to document, present, and obtain approval for new policies and models, ensuring full alignment with regulatory and institutional requirements.

Requirements

The ideal candidate brings 5-10 years of experience in credit risk strategy, portfolio management, or underwriting at a financial institution, fintech, or payments company. You have deep expertise in consumer credit portfolio management, including credit line management, utilization dynamics, and loss forecasting. Experience leveraging behavioral and bureau data to develop and optimize credit strategies for portfolio performance is essential. You possess strong SQL skills and extensive 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 is required. You demonstrate excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate complex credit tradeoffs into clear recommendations for executives, partners, and compliance teams. A proactive, bias-to-action mindset defines how you work, as you ask the right questions, align stakeholders, and drive decisions forward in a fast-paced environment. You have a proven ability to manage multiple priorities and deadlines while maintaining strict attention to detail and accuracy in analysis and reporting.

Nice to have

The source material does not specify any preferred items for this role beyond the core requirements and responsibilities listed above.

Practical notes

This role is full-time and based in San Francisco, California. Compensation for this position includes an annual starting salary range of $150,000 - $210,000 plus equity and a comprehensive benefits package. Actual compensation is influenced by factors including skills, experience, and specific work location. Benefits include meaningful startup equity, 100% health, vision, and dental primary coverage, 75% health, vision, and dental dependent coverage, catered lunches, a $250/month commuter benefit, parental leave, team building events and happy hours, flexible PTO with a minimum of 15 days off per year, Apple equipment, and a 401k plan. The office is located in the Mission District in San Francisco, with additional options to work from this office as discussed during the hiring process.