Program Manager, Bank Partnerships
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.
The Job
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 the person our bank partners hear from first, the person who knows where every open item stands, and the person who makes sure nothing reaches a bank as a surprise.
Cardless is a program manager that partners with FDIC- and OCC-regulated issuing banks to design and deliver co-branded credit cards. Our compliance team operates within this bank partnership model, which means the work must account for obligations across multiple bank partners with different regulators, different expectations, and different reporting cadences. Understanding the program-manager structure, where the bank holds the regulatory obligation and we perform the work, is key to succeeding in this role.
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. Today the work of keeping our bank partners informed and confident is spread across the team; this role consolidates it. You will build the trackers, the reporting rhythm, and the governance cadence, because they do not exist yet, and your first assignment is a live program launch.
The job in one line: run the checklist so that most of the work is done before it reaches a subject-matter expert, know the policy line well enough to say "that was already decided," and hear about problems before they land on a bank partner's desk.
Responsibilities
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: partner status packages, launch trackers with real dates behind them, escalation notes, diligence responses, and management responses to bank findings. You author the judgment in them, not just the formatting.
Carry unfavorable news to a bank partner accurately and early. Know the difference between a status update and a commitment, and do not accept a date the delivery team has not 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 the trackers and scorecards behind them, tuned to each bank's regulator and reporting rhythm.
Maintain the obligations and requirements tracker for each bank agreement, and hold internal owners to the dates they gave.
Translate internal workstreams into clear, partner-ready updates, and prepare our own team for partner meetings, including with senior stakeholders at the banks.
Identify friction on rewards, payments, disputes, and other program mechanics before it becomes an escalation, and route it to the right owner with a proposed answer.
Support due diligence and onboarding for new bank and brand partners as the portfolio grows, and support examination and audit requests that come through our bank partners.
Use AI and automation tooling to keep the trackers, the status packages, and the checklists current with less manual work.
Requirements
10+ years of experience 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 banking, fintech, or 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.
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 disclosure. You would rather over-communicate a risk now than let a partner be surprised later, and you can describe a time you did.
Experience working cross-functionally with compliance, legal, product, and engineering teams.
Comfort operating in ambiguity and building process where none exists yet.
Comfort using data analytics 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 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 or program from contract signing through go-live.
Technical program management background.
Before You Apply
A few things worth knowing:
We work in the office 5 days a week and that is what we are hiring for. We know it's a dealbreaker for some people, and that's okay. If you are close but not five days, say so when you apply.
This is an early-stage company. We're a small team servicing hundreds of thousands of customers. You'll be building processes that don't exist yet, not optimizing ones that do. If you want structure handed to you, this isn't the right fit.
You'll need to be highly self-directed. There isn't a playbook for this role, and you won't get daily check-ins. We're looking for someone who sees what's broken or missing, takes ownership, and follows through without being asked.
The pace is intense and this role is hands-on. We have aggressive goals and a lot to build. This isn't a 9-to-5, quiet, maintenance-mode job; you'll be in the middle of everything.
If this sounds like the kind of environment where you do your best work, we'd love to hear from you.
Who Thrives in This Role, and What Success Looks Like
Who thrives here
You are the person who writes the document, not the person who schedules the meeting about it. You have carried bad news to a counterparty that could have made your life difficult, and you did it early because you understood that a surprise costs more than the news. You know that a bank partner is not a client to be kept comfortable but 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 an empty calendar. You build a mechanism rather than absorbing the work by hand, and you reach for tooling without being asked.
What success looks like
In your first 90 days you have taken over the status cadence with each of our bank partners, stood up a live launch tracker with real dates that internal owners have agreed to, and personally authored your first partner status package end to end. By six months, our bank partners hear about every material issue from us before they hear it from anyone else, the launch you inherited has gone live on the timeline you held, the governance cadence runs without our CCO 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. 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, 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.
