---
title: 'Payments & Risk Operations Manager at Cantina'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/payments-risk-operations-manager-cantina-bay-area-8vxjey1a9qp4'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Payments & Risk Operations Manager at Cantina

- **Company:** Cantina
- **Location:** Bay Area, OR
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-08-19
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cantina/fb9a1183-3932-4a5f-83e7-65eac64da966

## Job description

## About Cantina

Cantina Labs is a social AI company, developing a suite of advanced real-time models that push the boundaries of expression, personality, and realism. We bring characters to life, transforming how people tell stories, connect, and create. We build and power ecosystems. Cantina, our flagship social AI platform, is just the beginning. If you're excited about the potential AI has to shape human creativity and social interactions, join us in building the future!

## About the Role

[Cantina.ai](http://Cantina.ai) is building a commerce business—subscriptions, credits, and payments—and we're looking for the person who will own customer support for it. You won't be doing this alone. Executives and teammates across Product, Engineering, and Operations are already invested in getting this right. Your job is to turn that shared focus into a support function that actually works, day to day. Early on, that means rolling up your sleeves: working tickets yourself, building the first workflows, and getting a system in place fast. As volume grows, you'll shift toward setting direction, managing our vendor partners for billing and payments and overflow customer support capacity, and knowing which cases need Product, Engineering, or leadership rather than your own hands. We think this is a great fit for someone 3-7 years into their career who's run support or support ops before, enjoys building something new alongside people who care about it, and wants real ownership over how it takes shape. The role reports into Operations and works closely with the Product and Engineering teams behind subscriptions. It starts as an individual contributor role with high ownership; and as the business scales, you'll help decide whether and how the team grows with it.

## What You'll Do

- Own day-to-day customer support across eCommerce. Handle billing questions, cancellations, refunds, credit balance and top-up issues, failed or disputed payments, access issues, and general customer inquiries directly, especially early on while volume is low and workflows are still taking shape.
- Own payments risk operations. Monitor fraud, refund abuse, disputes and chargeback patterns; investigate anomalous transaction and account behavior; develop policies and operational controls that balance loss prevention with a low-friction customer experience; and partner with Product, Engineering and our payment provider on improvements to authorization, fraud prevention and dispute performance.
- Create and maintain the playbook. Build support workflows, macros, escalation paths, and SLAs across subscriptions, credits, and payments, working closely with the executives and teammates across Product, Engineering, and Operations who are also focused on getting this right.
- Leverage and manage the payment platform relationship. Own billing operations with our payments platform day to day—disputes, chargebacks, failed payments, refund workflows, credit/balance adjustments, and reconciliation questions—coordinating with Finance as needed.
- Leverage and manage the outsourced operations relationship. Serve as the primary point of contact with our outsourced operations team for surge/overflow support capacity, including onboarding their agents, maintaining documentation and macros they'll use, monitoring quality, and adjusting volume commitments as demand fluctuates.
- Escalate effectively. Recognize which cases need to go beyond you—to Product or Engineering for a bug or root-cause fix, to Finance for a billing exception, or to leadership for a judgment call—and route them clearly rather than trying to resolve everything solo.
- Partner with Product and Engineering. Surface recurring support themes, bugs, and friction points; represent the voice of the customer in roadmap conversations; validate fixes before they ship.
- Track and report on support health. Own core support metrics (response time, resolution time, CSAT, ticket volume/drivers by category, cost per ticket) and report on them regularly to Operations leadership.
- Scale the model. As volume grows across subscriptions, credits, and payments, help determine when and how to bring on additional internal headcount vs. lean further on outsourced operations, and help build out whatever tooling (help desk platform, macros, self-serve/FAQ content) is needed to keep up.

## What We're Looking For

- 3-7 years of experience in payments operations, payments risk, fraud operations, billing operations, or customer operations for a high-volume consumer product, with hands-on experience resolving complex customer cases.
- Experience with payments risk, fraud operations, disputes/chargebacks, or transaction monitoring in a consumer subscription, marketplace, gaming, virtual currency/credits, or digital-goods business.
- Direct, hands-on experience actually working support tickets—not just managing a team that does.
- Experience working with a payments/billing platform (Stripe or similar strongly preferred) and comfort navigating billing edge cases like disputes, refunds, and failed payments.
- Experience managing or coordinating with a BPO or outsourced support vendor (TaskUs or similar) through standard operational KPIs is a strong plus.
- Comfort operating cross-functionally with Product and Engineering: you can translate ticket and account patterns into clear, prioritized, data-informed feedback they'll actually act on.
- A builder's mindset – you're energized by implementing a process where none exists yet, and comfortable doing so alongside others across the company who are already invested in getting it right.
- Strong written communication – you'll be writing macros, documentation, and escalation summaries that other people (including vendor agents) rely on.
- Comfortable with ambiguity and change – this function will look different in six months than it does today, and you'll be the one shaping that evolution.
- Thrives in a fast-paced environment with minimal structure or oversight – you will set priorities with your manager, but do not need a manager checking in daily to stay on track.

Bonus:

- Strong data skills - ability to utilize dashboards to track metrics and do basic investigations to spot and explore problems; ability to build or edit SQL queries (or willingness/ability to learn)
- Using AI to scale - experience optimizing workflows and processes by building or utilizing AI agents

Compensation: The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is between $150,000-$170,000. When determining compensation, a number of factors will be considered, including skills, experience, job scope, location, and competitive compensation market data.

Benefits:

- Competitive salary and generous company equity
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance – 99.99% of premiums covered by Cantina
- 42 days of paid time off, including:
- 15 PTO days
- 10 sick days
- 15 company holidays
- 2 floating holidays
- Generous parental leave & fertility support
- 401(k) retirement savings plan
- Lifestyle spending account – $500/month to use however you’d like
- Complimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees
- One Medical membership, and more!

## About Cantina

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Cantina is a social AI platform that lets users create, chat with, and share AI characters that talk, perform, and interact in real-time.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed Stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Not publicly listed; key leadership includes Co-Founder Prakash Ramakrishna

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Social AI / Social Media / Software Development
- **Target customers**: B2C (consumers), with a creator/developer ecosystem for building AI characters
- **Mission or purpose**: "Infinite Creativity Unlocked" — bringing AI characters to life to transform how people tell stories, connect, and create.

## Products & Services
- **Cantina App**: A social media platform where users chat with friends and AI, create video messages, share with friends, and "set bots free." The flagship product is a mobile-first experience focused on real-time AI character interaction.
- **Cantina AI Models**: A suite of advanced real-time models pushing the boundaries of expression, personality, and realism for AI characters.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding — Seed Round (1 investor, amount undisclosed); 148 employees as of mid-2026
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: 1 seed investor (name not publicly disclosed); member of the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew 7.2% YoY (+29 people) to 148 employees
  - Monthly website traffic growth of +47.7% and yearly growth of +149.8%
  - Active job postings: 13 (yearly job posting growth of +44.4%)
  - Operates in 15 countries with 4 offices (San Francisco HQ, Sunnyvale, Brooklyn NY, and another Brooklyn location)
  - High LinkedIn follower growth (+9.9% yearly) reaching 22,462 followers

## Competitive Advantages
- **Real-time AI character technology**: Builds proprietary real-time models for expression, personality, and realism — a technical moat in the rapidly growing social AI space.
- **Creator ecosystem**: Allows users to build and release their own AI characters, creating a network effect and UGC flywheel.
- **First-mover in social AI**: One of the earliest platforms combining social networking with generative AI characters for mass consumer use.
- **Strong talent pool**: Employees recruited from top tech companies including Airtime (18), Aircore (26), Meta (4), Grammarly (4), TikTok (4), Amazon (3), and BeReal (4).

## Strategic Focus
- **Product expansion**: Actively hiring for Kotlin Multiplatform Engineer, iOS Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer (Images), and Media Software Engineer (Speech) — indicating a push toward cross-platform mobile, image generation, and speech capabilities.
- **Safety and trust**: Joined the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) in 2025 and invested heavily in trust & safety infrastructure, signaling a commitment to responsible AI.
- **Monetization and growth**: Hiring a Head of Product Marketing, Creator Partner Manager, and Product Managers for Video and Web — suggesting moves toward monetization, creator partnerships, and web-based experiences.
- **Research-driven**: Actively recruiting ML engineers and research talent, with 10% of workforce in Research roles.

## Why Work Here
- **Cutting-edge AI work**: Engineers work on real-time AI models for speech, images, and character interaction — at the intersection of generative AI and social media.
- **Strong technical culture**: 66 employees (15% of workforce) in Technical roles, with a tech stack including PyTorch, TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Docker, GCP, Snowflake, and modern mobile frameworks (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Swift).
- **Growth stage**: At 148 employees and 13 open roles, this is a growth-stage startup where new hires can have outsized impact.
- **Flexible locations**: Offices in San Francisco (HQ), Sunnyvale, and Brooklyn (two locations) — with a distributed workforce across 15 countries.
- **Creative, fun environment**: Company culture emphasizes creativity ("Minister of Bots" is a real title) and viral social experiences.
- **Notable perks**: Team has a dedicated Comedy Director and "Chief Horse Officer" — indicating a playful, unconventional culture.
- **High talent density**: Recruits from top AI and social media companies (Meta, TikTok, Grammarly, Amazon, Apple, Netflix alumni).

## Sources
1. [cantina.com](https://cantina.com/)
2. [LinkedIn - Cantina Labs](https://www.linkedin.com/company/cantinaai)
3. [Cantina Careers (Ashby)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cantina)
4. [Cantina Careers Page](https://cantina.com/careers)

## Other roles at Cantina

- [Research Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/research-intern-cantina-singapore-0t2dg9nfd7y1) — Singapore
- [Machine Learning Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-intern-cantina-singapore-wnsca7rtewty) — Singapore
- [Product Manager, Growth - Lifecycle](https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-growth-lifecycle-cantina-san-francisco-fs4n56y79qc2) — San Francisco, CA
- [Media Software Engineer, Speech (Senior-Staff Levels)](https://feeny.ai/job/media-software-engineer-speech-senior-staff-levels-cantina-sunnyvale-amr9rvpwq2gp) — Sunnyvale, CA
- [Machine Learning Engineer - Voice Conversion](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-voice-conversion-cantina-united-states-europe-fpbamgtxrfs0) — United States / Europe
- [Machine Learning Engineer, Speech - Joint Audio-Video Modeling](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-speech-joint-audio-video-modeling-cantina-united-81jhte7m6h5q) — United States / Europe
- [Machine Learning Engineer, Ops](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-ops-cantina-united-states-europe-zr6h1nf499dk) — United States / Europe
- [Director, Brand Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/director-brand-marketing-cantina-los-angeles-dhngs7psnehq) — Los Angeles, CA
- [Senior Creative Strategist, Performance Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-creative-strategist-performance-marketing-cantina-remote-gxzcxj5fv99e)
- [Staff Software Engineer, Backend](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-backend-cantina-los-angeles-y3jk4ycetkqy) — Los Angeles, CA / San Francisco, CA