Consumer Compliance Manager, Complaints

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

As a Consumer Compliance Manager, Complaints at Cardless you will partner with our Customer Experience team, turning consumer complaint trends into fixes that address root causes, not just one-off remediations. We see complaints as direct, free feedback from our most valued asset: our customers, and we treat that signal with the weight it deserves.

In this role, you'll partner closely with CX on investigation and response, own trending and reporting to our bank partners, and take on the part most complaint roles never get to: tracing patterns back to root cause and driving the remediation that closes the loop for good.

Cardless is a program manager that partners with FDIC- and OCC-regulated issuing banks to design and deliver co-branded credit and debit card programs. Our compliance team operates within this bank partnership model, which means your complaint work must account for obligations across multiple bank partners with different regulatory expectations, categorization standards, and reporting cadences. Understanding the program manager structure is key to succeeding in this role.

This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role. You will personally work on critical complaints, support investigations, review responses, and work with Customer Experience and Engineering to get the underlying defect fixed. You will also have the opportunity to help automate the function itself. We have the foundations of a complaint handling program in place. Still, you'll be responsible for identifying overall program enhancements, including clear intake, defined categorization, tracked target dates, real trend analysis, and audit-ready records. We're also in the process of implementing better tooling, and you'll be responsible for overseeing the systems implementation.

This is a high-ownership role for someone who is energized by messy, cross-functional problems and who is not satisfied with closing a ticket when the thing that caused it is still there.

What you'll do

Own the complaint program end to end

• Own intake, triage, categorization, investigation, and resolution for consumer complaints across our card programs, including direct complaints and agency complaints from the CFPB, FDIC, Better Business Bureau, state attorneys general, and counsel.

• Draft investigation summaries and consumer responses that are accurate, plain-spoken, and defensible if a regulator reads them later.

• Manage complaint target dates and turnaround commitments, and escalate before a clock is missed rather than after.

• Produce the monthly complaint reporting package for each bank partner, including trend analysis and a written summary, and adapt each package to that partner's categorization and reporting expectations.

• Prepare quarterly complaint findings for the Compliance Committee and the Board.

Find the root cause, not just the resolution

• Analyze complaint volume, categories, and drivers to identify patterns rather than treating each complaint as an isolated event.

• Run root cause analysis on recurring complaint themes, distinguishing a one-time servicing error from a product defect, a disclosure gap, a broken workflow, or a control failure.

• Convert confirmed root causes into logged issues with corrective action plans, named owners, and target dates.

• Drive remediation to closure with Engineering, Product, and Operations, validate that the fix worked, and confirm the complaint theme actually stops recurring.

• Escalate repeat issues clearly and early, especially where a previously remediated problem resurfaces.

Partner with Customer Experience

• Work side by side with our Customer Experience team, which is the front line for complaint intake, to improve how complaints are identified, tagged, and documented at first contact.

• Write and maintain the procedures, response templates, and agent guidance that let the front line handle routine matters correctly without escalation.

• Provide practical regulatory guidance to support agents in the moment, and build the review loop that catches handling problems before a consumer escalates.

Strengthen the program

• Improve complaint tooling, intake workflows, and reporting, including automation, so coverage scales faster than headcount.

• Maintain complaint records and documentation that are organized, complete, and ready for an examination or an audit.

• Support examination readiness and bank partner reviews by providing complaint data, investigations, and remediation status.

• Provide coverage across other compliance functions, as needed.

What we're looking for

• Typically 4 to 7 years in consumer compliance, complaint management, consumer advocacy, disputes, or a closely related function within banking, fintech, credit cards, lending, or payments.

• Hands-on experience investigating and resolving consumer complaints, including regulatory and agency complaints, in a regulated consumer financial services environment.

• Working knowledge of the consumer protection regulations that complaints turn on: Regulation Z, Regulation E, Regulation B, UDAAP, FCRA, and FDCPA.

• Demonstrated root cause analysis skill. You can take a cluster of complaints, work out what is actually causing them, and say so in writing with evidence behind it.

• Experience driving corrective action across functions you do not manage, particularly with Engineering and Operations, and following it through to validated closure.

• Excellent written communication. A large share of this job is writing: consumer responses, investigation summaries, and reporting that leadership and bank partners rely on.

• Comfort using data and AI tools to work more efficiently and expand coverage rather than adding manual steps.

• Strong organization and the ability to hold many open matters with hard deadlines without dropping one.

• Proven ability to operate independently in a fast-paced environment, without a defined playbook or daily check-ins.

Bonus Points

• Experience in credit card issuing or co-branded card programs.

• Experience responding to CFPB portal complaints or working complaints alongside a partner bank.

• Background in disputes, fraud, or servicing operations, which is where many complaint root causes live.

• Experience building or maturing a complaint management program rather than inheriting a finished one.

• Experience writing procedures, response templates, or agent guidance for a support organization.

• CRCM or another consumer compliance certification.

• Fluency with workflow automation and comfort building the tooling you wish you had.

This role isn't a fit if

• You need a hybrid or remote schedule. We work in the office 5 days a week at our San Francisco office.

• You want structure handed to you. You will be building processes that do not exist yet, not optimizing ones that do.

• You want a playbook and daily check-ins. There is not one for this role, and we are looking for someone who sees what is broken or missing, takes ownership, and follows through without being asked.

• You are looking for a quiet, maintenance-mode compliance job. This one is hands-on, and you will be in the middle of everything.

• You are satisfied once the response letter goes out. Complaints here are real people having a bad experience with a product we built, and the job is to make the pattern stop.

Why this role

• You get the whole loop. Most complaint roles stop at the response letter. This one runs through root cause, corrective action, and validation, so you actually get to fix things rather than apologize for them repeatedly.

• Complaints are one of the most visible compliance functions we have. Your analysis goes to our bank partners, the Compliance Committee, and the Board.

• Build the program, do not inherit it. Complaint handling works today, but you'll get the chance to optimize it. You will turn it into an efficient and effective operating program that will help mitigate future issues and complaints.

• Work across multiple bank partner relationships with different regulators and expectations.

• You will sit at the intersection of Compliance, Customer Experience, Engineering, and Product, which is the best seat in the company for understanding how everything actually works.

• We are AI-forward, and we mean it. If you want to automate the boring parts of this job, nobody will stop you (in fact, we give you all the resources to do it).

What success looks like. In your first 90 days, you have taken over the live complaint queue, and nothing is missing a target date. You have learned our programs, products, and partners well enough to investigate without a chaperone; you have mapped how complaints actually arrive today across every channel, and you have a first cut of complaint categorization and trend reporting that our bank partners recognize as an improvement. By six months, you own a functioning complaint program: defined intake, consistent categorization, reliable monthly reporting to each bank partner, and quarterly findings that go to the Compliance Committee and the Board without a fire drill. You have taken at least two recurring complaint themes all the way through root cause to validated remediation, and the volume in those categories is measurably down. Customer Experience is handling routine matters correctly at first contact because you gave them the procedures and templates to do it.

Compensation

This role has an annual starting salary range of $135,000 to $160,000 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

Other

We're headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with a beautiful office in Jackson Square, near the Transamerica building, between the Montgomery and Embarcadero BART stations. This role is in-office 5 days a week.

Example Projects

• Take a month of complaints, work out which ones are the same problem wearing different words, and write the root cause memo that turns the cluster into a logged issue with an owner and a date.

• Rebuild the monthly complaint package for one bank partner so the categories match that partner's taxonomy and the trend narrative says what changed and why.

• Write the agent-facing procedure and response templates for one recurring complaint type so the front line handles it correctly at first contact.

• Own the rollout of the new complaint tooling: intake fields, categorization, target-date tracking, and the reporting that comes out the other end.We're looking for a compliance professional to partner with our Customer Experience team, turning consumer complaint trends into fixes that address root causes, not just one-off remediations. We see complaints as direct, free feedback from our most valued asset: our customers, and we treat that signal with the weight it deserves.