Payment Platform Manager

About this role

PAYMENT PLATFORM MANAGER

At Cardless, we're building a credit card and loyalty platform that consumer businesses use to engage their customers. We've launched over a dozen credit card programs, including for Coinbase, Bilt, 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 outsized 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 $150M in equity funding from top venture capital firms including Spark Capital, American Express, Activant Capital, and more.

THE JOB

The person who ends up in this role might come from card operations. They might also come from technical program management, platform engineering ops, fintech infrastructure, or bank operations. What matters is that you're the kind of person who takes ownership of a complex technical platform - learns how it actually works, becomes the person everyone relies on, and builds the operating model around it.

At Cardless, that platform is our issuer processor. It's the system that powers every card program we run - authorizations, settlements, billing, statement generation, cardholder account management. Today that's CoreCard. Where the processor connects to card networks (Visa, Mastercard, Amex) and our BIN sponsor bank, you own that coordination too.

You'll be the platform technical owner for this layer. That means a few things at once: you're the relationship manager with our processor partner, the internal subject matter expert when Product or Engineering or Compliance has a question about how the platform behaves, and the operator who makes sure configurations are accurate, changes are implemented cleanly, and nothing breaks in production.

This role sits on a small payment operations team reporting to the COO. You won't be slotting into an existing function with established runbooks - you'll be building the operating model for how Cardless manages its processor layer as we scale. If you've built something like this before (even in a different domain), you know what that takes. If you haven't but you're the kind of person who gets pulled into the hardest platform problems at your company because you're the best operator available, this is that job.

EXAMPLE PROJECTS

Building the processor operating model from scratch. Today, processor knowledge at Cardless lives across a few people's heads. You document platform behavior, funds flows, and configuration logic so the company isn't single-threaded on any one person. You establish the intake process for change requests, the validation steps before anything goes to production, and the monitoring that catches issues before they become incidents.

Configuring a new card program end-to-end. We're launching a new co-branded card program. You lead processor setup: BIN assignment, billing table configuration, APR structures, fee schedules, statement generation settings. You coordinate with the BIN sponsor, card network, and internal teams to get the program live accurately and on time.

Diagnosing a transaction lifecycle issue. A partner flags that volumes in their reporting don't match ours. You trace the issue through authorization, clearing, and settlement data - processor file, network feed, or internal system - and drive it to resolution. You can articulate what happened to Engineering, Finance, and the partner without anyone getting lost.

Implementing a processor migration or platform change. Our processor partner releases a platform update that affects how settlement files are structured. You assess downstream impacts to reconciliation and reporting, coordinate implementation with Engineering, validate in test, and own the cutover. Nobody is surprised.

Operationalizing network mandates. Visa or Mastercard pushes a compliance mandate with a hard deadline. You assess impact to processor configuration and cardholder experience, coordinate implementation, and validate compliance - all while keeping the rest of the team focused on their own work.

BEFORE YOU APPLY

A few things worth knowing:

This is a build role, not a maintenance role. You'll be establishing how Cardless manages its processor platform, not maintaining someone else's system. That means ambiguity, judgment calls, and a lot of first-drafts. If you want a well-defined process to follow, this isn't it.

This is an IC role. No direct reports. You'll be a senior individual contributor on a small, high-output team. Influence without authority is the operating model.

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

You need to be technical enough to build, not just spec. You don't need to be a software engineer, but you need to be comfortable with SQL, working directly in processor portals and admin systems, and building operational workflows. If your version of "automation" is writing a requirements doc and handing it off, this isn't the right fit.

Processor experience is valued but not required. If you've worked in a card processor platform before, great. If you haven't but you've owned a complex, production-critical technical platform and you learn systems fast, we'll teach you the processor-specific knowledge. The operational instincts are harder to teach than the domain.

WHY THIS ROLE IS COOL

You'll build a function, not fill a seat. This is the kind of role where three years from now, the team around you exists because of the foundation you laid. That's rare.

The platform is the product. Every card program, every cardholder experience, every transaction runs through the system you own. Your configurations have direct, visible impact on real products people use.

The scope is genuinely broad. Processor config, settlement operations, network

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