Manager, Partner Growth

Job description

ABOUT CARDLESS Cardless is a Series C consumer fintech that uses AI to make it easy for the world's largest brands to build credit cards into their ecosystems. Think Shopify, but for credit cards. Brands use Cardless to configure, launch, and grow credit card programs that delight their customers and strengthen their core business. Customers include Coinbase, Bilt Rewards, Alibaba, Qatar Airways, and LATAM Airlines. Cardless powers cards on all three major networks (Visa, Mastercard, and American Express) and uses agentic servicing to operate at a fraction of the headcount and cost that traditional card issuers require. The company has scaled from $10 million to $150 million in run rate revenue in the past 12 months. Cardless raised a $60 million Series C led by Spark Capital in September 2025, bringing total funding past $170 million. The team is past 70 people and scaling toward profitability by year-end 2026. ABOUT THE ROLE Cardless doesn't just need to land brand partners — once a partner like Coinbase or Bilt signs on, someone has to make sure their card program actually works, keeps growing, and never feels like a black box on the other end. That requires someone who owns the relationship after the ink dries, spots problems before the partner has to raise them, and knows how to find the next dollar of growth inside an account that already trusts Cardless. This role is that person. As Manager of Partner Growth, you will own the full portfolio of live Cardless brand partners. You will be the primary point of contact for accounts like Coinbase and Bilt — responsible for the health of each relationship, the performance of their card program, and identifying where there's room to expand it. You will also be the internal quarterback for your accounts: triaging issues across product, support, and operations so partners get fast, accurate answers instead of getting bounced between teams. This role reports to the Chief Business Officer of Cardless. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role with a clear mandate: keep every partner in your portfolio healthy, catch and resolve issues before they become escalations, and grow the value of each account over time. You will be evaluated on portfolio retention, the speed and quality of issue resolution, and the growth you generate within existing accounts. WHAT YOU WILL DO Own the Partner Relationship - Serve as the primary point of contact for every partner in your portfolio — from Qatar Airlines to Coinbase to Bilt to whoever comes next — building the kind of trust that outlasts any single ticket or QBR. - Understand each partner's business, not just their card program: their goals, their internal dynamics, and what "success" looks like from their seat, not just from ours. - Build relationships with both the day-to-day operators and the executives at each partner, so you have the standing to raise hard truths and the credibility to be believed. - Represent Cardless internally as the voice of the partner — making sure product, support, and leadership understand what each account actually needs, not just what they happen to ask for. Grow the Value of Existing Programs - Track the performance of every program in your portfolio — activation, spend, retention — and know which levers actually move those numbers for each partner. - Identify and pitch expansion opportunities within existing accounts — new features, new segments, new use cases — before the partner has to ask for them. - Bring a point of view to each partner on how their program compares to what's possible, drawing on data and patterns from across the Cardless portfolio, not just their own account. - Work with the product and business teams to make sure roadmap priorities reflect what will actually move the needle for partners who are already live, not just what's easiest to build. Triage and Resolve Issues Across the Business - Be the first call when something goes wrong — an outage, a compliance question, a partner complaint — and own getting it resolved, not just routed to someone else. - Build the internal relationships and judgment to know who to pull in fast, whether that's product, support, engineering, or compliance, and hold ownership of the issue until it's actually closed. - Distinguish signal from noise: know which issues are genuinely urgent to a partner's business and which are day-to-day friction that doesn't need to become a fire drill. - Close the loop with partners honestly — what happened, what Cardless is doing about it, and what they can expect going forward. Spearhead and Create the Partner Growth Process - Run a regular cadence of business reviews with each partner, grounded in real performance data and a clear point of view on what's next for their program. - Maintain an honest, current view of account health across your portfolio — flagging risk early, before a partner has already started looking elsewhere. - Maintain the systems — CRM, account plans, escalation logs — that make account management repeatable and scalable as the portfolio grows. - Provide regular, honest reporting to leadership on portfolio health, growth opportunities, and the operational issues most worth fixing upstream. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR Experience - 5-10 years in business development, partnerships, sales, or an account management role with meaningful exposure to financial services — ideally including time at a bank, card issuer, or payment network. - A demonstrated track record of cultivating and growing major enterprise partnerships by adding major new milestones, new processes, and top-line revenue - Payments expertise, with working knowledge of schemes, payments risk and fraud, and other payments basics. Skills and Competencies - Relationship Stewardship: You know how to keep a relationship deepening over years. You can be the same partner's first call three years in, because you've earned it every week along the way. - Financial Services Fluency: You understand how card programs work — the economics, the players, the contract structures, the regulatory context — well enough to have a credible commercial conversation with a partner's finance or operations leadership, and to notice when a program's numbers are quietly drifting off track. - Operational Discipline: You run a clean portfolio. You know the health of every account, what's at risk, and what the next step is for each one. Nothing falls through the cracks because you didn't know it was there. - Communication and Presence: You are effective in a room with senior partner executives — as comfortable delivering hard news or defusing a tense escalation as you are running a polished quarterly business review. You can also write. - Cross-Functional Orchestration: You know how Cardless actually works internally — who owns what, who moves fast, who needs to be looped in early — and you use that knowledge to get a partner's problem solved quickly instead of stuck in a queue. - Judgment and Autonomy: You can prioritize your time across a portfolio of accounts with different needs, and make good calls about which squeaky wheel actually deserves grease — without needing to be managed at the activity level. THIS ROLE IS NOT A FIT IF - You want to work on new business sales. This role is about making existing customers more successful than they could ever have expected to be with a credit card. - You do not have meaningful experience in financial services — a general enterprise sales or account management background without exposure to banking, cards, or payments will not be sufficient for the conversations this role requires. - You require remote or hybrid work arrangements. WHY THIS ROLE Cardless has found product-market fit, has live programs with major brands, and is growing fast. What it does not yet have is a dedicated business development function — the top of the commercial funnel has been driven by the founders and the CBO, and ongoing relationships have been covered by multiple functions across the company. This role is the first dedicated hire entirely focused on growing existing portfolios, which means the person who joins now will set the template for how Cardless makes its customers wildly successful. COMPENSATION This role has an annual starting salary range of $122,000–$155,000 + 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.