Lead Product Manager - Risk & Fraud

About this role

Lead Product Manager - Risk & Fraud

: San Francisco, CA, United States

: Sep 25, 2026

About the role

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

Risk and fraud is one of the hardest and most dynamic problems in financial services. Fraudsters adapt, new attack patterns emerge, and the systems that worked yesterday won't necessarily work tomorrow.

Cardless is uniquely positioned to take this on. By combining partner data with behavioral and financial data from our platform, we have the ingredients for a uniquely powerful decisioning system. We're looking for a Senior Product Manager to help us take it to the next level, building toward AI-powered decisioning that continuously learns and adapts to approve more good customers and reduce losses.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Set the long-term vision and roadmap for risk and fraud systems, spanning application fraud, account takeover, transaction fraud, ongoing account risk, and disputes.
• Turn Cardless's data into an intelligence advantage, combining partner, behavioral, financial, and network signals to make decisioning more predictive and personalized.
• Own how risk and fraud decisions are made, from signals and models to the rules, thresholds, and actions they drive, balancing loss prevention with friction for good customers.
• Take our decisioning to the next level with AI and machine learning, improving detection, adapting to emerging fraud patterns, and automating more decisions.
• Make every decision explainable and auditable, so teams can understand why it was made, trace the signals behind it, and investigate when needed.
• Make the right build-vs-buy decisions across the risk stack, own what differentiates Cardless, and use external vendors where they make sense.
• Design risk capabilities that work across partners, customers, products, and risk appetites without creating one-off systems.
• Define how we measure and communicate risk performance, connecting decisions to approvals, losses, customer friction, and program economics while giving partners clear visibility into performance.

WHO YOU ARE

• You've built or owned fraud, risk, or decisioning products at a bank, issuer, processor, fintech, or fraud and identity company, and understand how quickly the space evolves.
• You have a strong point of view on where AI and machine learning can take risk decisioning, and can translate that vision into better decisions and customer outcomes.
• You're highly analytical and comfortable working directly with data, able to investigate patterns, test hypotheses, and get to answers yourself.
• You're technically strong and comfortable going deep with engineers and data scientists on signals, models, rules engines, decision flows, and edge cases.
• You think in systems and can turn complexity into clear product direction, connecting risk decisions to customer experience, compliance, operations, and partner economics.
• You're an excellent communicator who makes complex risk problems understandable, clearly explaining what matters, what we're prioritizing, and why.

COMPENSATION

This role has an annual starting salary range of $200,000–$250,000 + equity + benefits. 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. This role is in-office 5 days a week.