Fraud Strategy Manager / Senior Manager (Transaction Fraud)

At Cardless, we’re building a credit card and loyalty platform that consumer businesses use to engage their customers. We’ve launched 14 credit cards, including for Coinbase, Alibaba, 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 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 $90M in equity funding from top venture capital firms and angels.

The Job

We're looking for a Fraud Strategy Manager or Senior Manager – Transaction Fraud to own the strategy that governs how we evaluate and respond to transactions across our credit card portfolio. This is a deeply analytical, strategy-forward role at the heart of how Cardless protects customers and controls fraud losses without degrading the cardholder experience.

Reporting to our Chief Risk Officer, you'll define transaction-level decisioning logic across approve, decline, and step-up flows; build the control framework for account takeover, PII change events, and payment activity; and develop outburst detection strategies to catch fraud rings and velocity-driven attacks before losses compound.

What You'll Own

Transaction Decisioning Strategy

• Own the end-to-end framework for transaction-level fraud decisions: approve, decline, and conditional approval (step-up / challenge) across all Cardless-issued cards.

• Design and continuously tune decision logic that balances fraud loss prevention with authorization rates and cardholder experience.

• Define step-up and cardholder challenge strategies (e.g., OTP, push notification) for elevated-risk transactions, including triggers, cadence, and fallback handling.

• Partner with data science to translate model scores into operational policy; define score thresholds, override logic, and population segmentation.

Account Takeover (ATO) & PII Change Controls

• Build and own the fraud control framework for account takeover, covering credential compromise, SIM swap, social engineering, and call center impersonation vectors.

• Define detection logic and intervention strategy for high-risk account events: address changes, phone/email updates, card reissue requests, and beneficiary modifications.

• Establish authentication and step-up requirements for sensitive account changes, balancing fraud prevention with legitimate cardholder self-service.

• Track ATO rates, detection coverage, and false positive impact; build feedback loops to continuously refine controls.

Payment Hold & Fraud Payment Strategy

• Define the strategy for placing, managing, and releasing holds on payment activity (ACH payments, statement payments, balance transfers) based on fraud risk signals.

• Identify high-risk payment patterns: funding fraud, payment reversal abuse, and bust-out payment behavior, and design controls to intercept them before loss is realized.

• Establish clear SLAs and cardholder communication standards for payment holds to minimize friction for legitimate customers.

Outburst Detection & Response

• Build the detection and response framework for outburst events: coordinated fraud attacks, BIN attacks, merchant-level compromise, and fraud ring activity.

• Define real-time and near-real-time monitoring thresholds that trigger outburst protocols, including auto-controls and escalation paths.

• Lead the strategic response to active outbursts: scoping the affected population, applying targeted controls, and coordinating cross-functionally with Operations, Product, and network partners.

• Conduct post-event reviews to extract learnings and harden detection for future attacks.

Performance Measurement & Portfolio Monitoring

• Define and own the KPI framework for transaction fraud: fraud rate by transaction type, channel, and partner; false positive rate; authorization decline rate; ATO rate; chargeback rate; and outburst loss exposure.

• Conduct regular portfolio reviews to surface emerging fraud patterns, track loss trends, and assess control effectiveness.

• Build reporting infrastructure to enable real-time monitoring and rapid policy response.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner with Product and Engineering to translate fraud strategy into system requirements and influence roadmap prioritization.

• Work with Compliance and Legal to ensure transaction controls meet Reg E, Reg Z, network operating regulations, and UDAAP requirements.

• Collaborate with Customer Operations to handle cardholder disputes, false positive escalations, and ATO recovery workflows.

What We're Looking For

• 5–10 years of experience in transaction fraud strategy at a credit card issuer, fintech, payments network, or financial institution.

• Deep expertise in transaction fraud decisioning: CNP fraud, card-present fraud, ATO, payment fraud, and coordinated fraud attacks.

• Strong working knowledge of Visa, Mastercard, and/or Amex network rules: authorization, chargeback, dispute frameworks, and fraud monitoring programs.

• Experience owning ATO and account event fraud controls, including PII change monitoring and authentication strategy.

• Familiarity with payment hold strategy and funding fraud vectors (ACH returns, payment reversal abuse, bust-out patterns).

• Experience designing or responding to outburst / fraud ring events, including real-time detection and response.

• Strong SQL skills and experience using data to build, evaluate, and tune fraud rules and models.

• Excellent communication skills: you can translate complex fraud tradeoffs into clear recommendations for executives, card network partners, and compliance teams.

• Proactive, bias-to-action mindset: you move quickly, ask the right questions, and drive alignment across teams.

Compensation

This role has an annual starting salary range of $150,000 - $210,000 + equity + benefits (see below). Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors, including but not limited to skills, experience, and specific work location.

Benefits

We're headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with a beautiful office in the Mission District. 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 the Financial District. We welcome employees who want to work from this office; we offer additional benefits to those who do, and relocation assistance to those who'd like to.

We regularly bring our team together for offsites & trips, about every 2 months, both for fun and for work. We cover all travel & lodging in these cases.