---
title: 'Program Manager, Bank Partnerships at Cardless'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/program-manager-bank-partnerships-cardless-san-francisco-cmfscmm3g83y'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-19'
---

# Program Manager, Bank Partnerships at Cardless

- **Company:** Cardless
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $150k–$200k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-31
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-19
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cardless/2cff739f-9b8c-449f-b26f-d9e28add59e5

## 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

We're looking for a program manager to own the day-to-day working relationship between Cardless and the banks that issue our cards, and to run new card programs from signed deal to live launch. You will be our bank partners' primary point of contact, the person who knows where every open item stands and keeps each partner informed early. Cardless is a program manager that partners with FDIC- and OCC-regulated issuing banks to design and deliver co-branded credit cards, so the work has to account for obligations across multiple bank partners with different regulators, expectations, and reporting cadences. Understanding that structure, where the bank holds the regulatory obligation and we perform the work, is key to succeeding here. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role with no direct reports. You sit on the Compliance team and report to our Chief Compliance Officer. As our portfolio grows, this role brings bank partner management into one seat: you will build the trackers, the reporting rhythm, and the governance cadence for it, and your first assignment is a live program launch.

## What you'll do

- Own the day-to-day relationship with our issuing bank partners as their primary point of contact for program status, open items, approvals, and escalations.
- Personally write the documents our partners read: status packages, launch trackers with real dates behind them, diligence responses, and partner correspondence. You author the judgment in them, not just the formatting.
- Communicate risks and timeline changes to bank partners accurately and early, and commit only to dates the delivery team has agreed to.
- Run new program launches end to end: kickoff, the requirements and approvals checklist, partner-facing materials, legal and compliance milestones, and the launch timeline, coordinating Compliance, Legal, Product, Engineering, and Operations so each item arrives at the bank complete.
- Build and run the governance cadence with each partner (recurring check-ins, steering committees, quarterly reviews) and maintain the obligations tracker for each bank agreement, keeping internal owners to their dates.
- Translate internal workstreams into clear, partner-ready updates, prepare our team for partner meetings, and identify friction on rewards, payments, disputes, and other program mechanics early, routing it to the right owner with a proposed answer.
- Support due diligence and onboarding for new bank and brand partners, and examination and audit requests that come through our bank partners, and use AI and automation tooling to keep trackers, status packages, and checklists current.

## What we're looking for

- 10+ years in program management, partnerships, or account management at a bank, fintech, payments company, or other regulated financial services company. This is a requirement, not a preference: experience outside financial services does not qualify on its own.
- You have personally sat across from a bank or a regulator as the person responsible for a program, a deliverable, or a response.
- Demonstrated ability to manage complex, multi-stakeholder relationships where technical, legal, and business considerations all have to be balanced, working cross-functionally with compliance, legal, product, and engineering.
- Strong writing. You can take a messy cross-functional situation and produce a clear, accurate, partner-ready document from a blank page.
- A bias toward early communication. You would rather raise a risk now than have a partner learn of it late, and you can describe a time you did.
- Comfort operating in ambiguity, building process where none exists yet, and using data and AI tools to work more efficiently.
- You live within a reasonable commute of our San Francisco office, or you are relocating before you start (see the note on location below).

Bonus Points

- Experience with card issuing, co-branded credit card programs, or working directly with issuing or sponsor banks, from either side of the relationship.
- Familiarity with the regulatory considerations that shape bank and fintech partnerships: third-party risk management, program governance, and what an examination asks of a service provider.
- Experience launching a new financial product from contract signing through go-live, or a technical program management background.

This role isn't a fit if

- We work in the office 5 days a week in San Francisco (Jackson Square), and that is our strong preference. If you are in the Bay Area and would need a hybrid schedule, or you are based in the Salt Lake City area, apply anyway and tell us in your application; we would rather have the conversation than miss you. If you need a fully remote role, this is not the seat.
- There is no playbook for this role and no daily check-in. If you do your best work with structure handed to you, this is not the seat.
- This is a hands-on build, not a maintenance job. If you are looking for a quiet role with settled processes, this is not the seat.
- This seat writes the document, not the meeting invite about it. If you would rather coordinate the author than be the author, this is not the seat.

## Why this role

You are the person who writes the document, not the person who schedules the meeting about it. You have delivered difficult news to a counterparty early because you understood that late news costs more than early news. You know that a bank partner is a supervised institution with obligations of its own, and you can reason from that to what needs to be escalated and how fast. You are comfortable with a blank page, and you build a mechanism rather than absorbing the work by hand.

- Own the relationship with the banks that issue our cards, as the single voice they hear from first, reporting to our Chief Compliance Officer.
- Run a live program launch as your first assignment, from signed deal to go-live, and build the trackers, reporting rhythm, and governance cadence that the next programs run on.
- Sit at the intersection of Compliance, Legal, Product, Engineering, and Operations, with the bank partners on the other side of the table.

What success looks like at six months. Our bank partners hear about every material development from us first, the launch you inherited has gone live on the timeline you held, the governance cadence runs without our CCO needing to be in every meeting, and the reporting rhythm you built is the one a second and third program run on.

## Compensation

This role has an annual starting salary range of $150,000 to $200,000 plus equity and benefits (see below). Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skills, experience, and specific work location.

## Perks & 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

## About Cardless

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Cardless provides an embedded credit card platform with modular APIs and components that enable companies to build and launch branded, full-stack credit card programs.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C, led by Activant Capital, November 2024)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2019
- **Founders**: Scott Kazmierowicz (Co-Founder & CEO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Financial technology – embedded credit cards / co-branded credit card programs
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprise brands and high-growth companies (e.g., Coinbase, Bilt, Alibaba, Qatar Airways) that want to offer native credit card experiences to their customers
- **Mission or purpose**: Empower companies to ship credit like they ship product – with full control over how it works, looks, and grows.

## Products & Services
- **Embedded Credit Platform (APIs & Pre-built Components)**: A set of modular tools including Application flow, Checkout integration, Card management, Transaction disputes, fraud detection, and compliance (KYC/AML). Companies can embed approvals, rewards, and card management directly into their own app or website. [cardless.com/platform]
- **End-to-End Program Operations**: Cardless handles ongoing program management, customer support, transaction processing, settlement, card production, and compliance (PCI DSS Level 1 certified). [cardless.com/platform]
- **Decisioning & Feedback Loop**: Combines customer behavior data with network-level signals for underwriting, fraud detection, and reward optimization – adapts in real time. [cardless.com/platform]

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metrics**:
  - Annual Revenue: $9.8M (estimated, LinkedIn)
  - Total Funding: $195M across 7 rounds (as of 2024)
  - Employees: 41 (36.7% YoY growth)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Activant Capital (led Series C), Greycroft, Accomplice, i80 Group, Amex Ventures [linkedin.com, cbinsights.com]
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew 36.7% in the last year
  - 23 active job postings (+91.7% quarterly growth)
  - Partnerships with major brands: Coinbase, Bilt, Alibaba, Qatar Airways
  - Launched international presence in Saudi Arabia

## Competitive Advantages
- **True embedded credit, not white-label**: APIs and customizable components allow full control over UX and brand experience, rather than a static co-brand card.
- **Real-time data feedback loop**: Combines program-level credit data with user behavior for dynamic underwriting, fraud detection, and reward optimization.
- **Full-stack operations**: Covers compliance, card production, customer support, and regulatory requirements (PCI DSS Level 1), reducing go-to-market complexity.
- **Trusted by high-profile partners**: Real-world deployments with Coinbase, Bilt, Alibaba, and Qatar Airways provide credibility and network effects.

## Strategic Focus
- **Deepen platform capabilities**: Continue building modular components and improving the data feedback loop to help partners optimize engagement.
- **Expand enterprise pipeline**: Onboard more large consumer brands seeking to launch or upgrade co-branded credit programs.
- **Scale international operations**: Already in Saudi Arabia; likely expansion into other regions, replicating the Qatarr Airways and Alibaba models.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Work Style**: Cardless believes the best work is done in person. Office in San Francisco with daily lunch provided (dinner for late workers) and $250/month transportation reimbursement for in-office employees. [cardless.com/careers]
- **Compensation & Perks**: Competitive salary, meaningful equity, 401(k) plan, top-of-the-line medical/vision/dental insurance. Unlimited PTO with a minimum of 15 days taken per year. [cardless.com/careers]
- **Engineering Focus**: "Ship credit like they ship product" – engineers build consumer-facing financial products using modern APIs and infrastructure. The team includes talent from Uber, Robinhood, Chime, Plaid, and Lyft. [linkedin.com]
- **Growth Trajectory**: Rapidly hiring (+91.7% quarterly job postings) with a young, scaling company that has raised nearly $200M – offering ownership and impact.

## Sources
1. [cardless.com](https://www.cardless.com/)
2. [cardless.com/platform](https://www.cardless.com/platform)
3. [cardless.com/careers](https://www.cardless.com/careers)
4. [linkedin.com/company/cardless](https://www.linkedin.com/company/cardless)
5. [cbinsights.com/company/cardless](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/cardless)

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