Compliance Analyst/Manager, Issue Management at Cardless in San Francisco

Job description

• Application
• We're looking for a compliance professional to own issue management end to end: the inventory of known compliance issues across our card programs, the corrective action plans that resolve them, the consumer remediation that makes affected customers whole, and the reporting that tells our bank partners exactly where each issue stands.
• This is the role that decides whether a problem is actually fixed. Not fixed on a ticket, not fixed in a status update, but fixed in the product, validated with evidence, and closed with a record that holds up when an examiner reads it two years later.
• 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 every issue you work has to satisfy us, a brand partner, and an issuing bank with its own regulator, issue management guidance, numbering conventions, and reporting cadence. Understanding the program manager structure is key to succeeding in this role.
• This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role, and we are open on level. Depending on what you bring, this is an analyst seat or a manager seat, and the title and the offer follow what you can actually do. We care much more about how you think than about how many years you have done it. Today this work is done by our Compliance Officer alongside everything else he owns, which means it competes with whatever is on fire that week. Our bank partner told us plainly that this function needs a dedicated person who does not get pulled away. That person is you.
• You do not need a background in banking. Most postings like this one ask for years inside a bank. We are not going to. The regulations are learnable and we will teach them. What we cannot teach is the instinct to look at a number that does not add up and refuse to move on, so that is what we are screening for.
• You will inherit a real inventory: a live issue log spanning multiple bank partners, issues at every stage from newly identified through remediating to pending validation, and remediation populations that run from a handful of accounts into the thousands. Some of it is well documented. Some of it needs to be rebuilt into something defensible. You will be the one who knows, at any moment, what is open, who owns it, when the harm stopped, and what is left to prove.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Own the issue inventory
• Own the compliance issue log end to end: intake, classification, root cause, target dates, status, and closure, across every card program and bank partner.
• Log newly identified issues with the facts that matter: what broke, which regulation or requirement it touches, when it started, when consumer harm stopped, and how many customers are affected.
• Keep the log reconciled to each bank partner's own issue register, one for one, so the two records never tell different stories.
• Maintain a dated chronology for each issue at a granular level. Examiners ask what happened, when, who knew, and when it reached a compliance committee. The answer needs to already exist.
• Reassess aged issues honestly and negotiate achievable remediation timelines with the bank rather than letting dates quietly slip.
• Drive corrective action to validated closure
• Write corrective action plans that name the defect, the fix, the owner, the target date, and the evidence that will prove it worked.
• Establish and document the date ongoing consumer harm stopped for every consumer-impacting issue, and push for an interim control when the permanent fix is months away.
• Work with Engineering, Product, and Operations to get the underlying defect fixed, and distinguish a durable fix from a point patch that will resurface as a repeat finding.
• Test the fix yourself, or make sure someone did, before you call an issue remediated.
• Escalate early and in writing when a remediation date is going to be missed, or when a previously closed issue comes back.
• Scope and run consumer remediation
• Scope impacted populations by sub-issue, including the overlaps, so there is a full picture of who needs which kind of remediation.
• Design the remediation: what each affected population is owed, how it gets delivered, and how customers who are closed, charged off, or otherwise hard to reach are handled rather than quietly dropped.
• Verify after the fact that every customer received the amount they were supposed to receive, and build the audit trail that proves it.
• Partner with Finance and Operations on payment execution, and own the reconciliation when the numbers do not match.
• Report to bank partners and governance
• Produce the monthly issue log for each bank partner on a fixed date, with accurate status on every open item.
• Adopt and operate to each bank partner's issue management guidance, and adapt to differing expectations across partners.
• Respond to bank partner and examination requests on open issues, including remediation status, populations, and evidence, on short turnarounds.
• Prepare issue management reporting for the Compliance Committee and the Board.
• Strengthen the program
• Improve the tooling and workflow behind issue management, including automation, so the program scales faster than headcount.
• Turn recurring issue patterns into preventive controls and monitoring, so the same defect class does not come back.
• Keep issue records organized, complete, and examination ready at all times, not assembled in a scramble when a request arrives.
• Provide coverage across other compliance functions, as needed.

Requirements

• You think critically and you show your work. Given a problem with incomplete information, you can work out what actually happened, say what you are confident about and what you are not, and defend where you drew the line. This is the requirement. Everything else on this list is secondary to it.
• You finish things. You have personally taken a problem from "something is wrong here" through to fixed and verified, in whatever domain you have worked in. You are the person who checks that the fix held rather than assuming it did.
• You work with AI and you want to get better at it. You use AI tools in your actual work today, you have a sense of where they are reliable and where they are not, and you check their output instead of forwarding it. We will give you every tool we have; we expect you to outrun the job with them.
• You are comfortable around data. You can read a number, work out whether it can possibly be right, and notice when a count contradicts itself. You do not need to be an engineer.
• You write clearly. A large share of this job is writing: corrective action plans, issue narratives, remediation summaries, and reporting that our bank partners and their regulators read. Plain, precise, and defensible beats polished.
• You are willing to learn the regulations. You do not need to arrive knowing Regulation Z, Regulation E, Regulation B, UDAAP or FCRA. You do need to be genuinely interested in learning them properly, because the work does not make sense without them.
• You are organized enough to hold a lot at once. Dozens of open items with hard dates, and you do not lose one.
• You are self-directed. There is no playbook here and no daily check-in. You see what is broken or missing, you take it, and you follow through without being asked.
• Any background is welcome. Financial services, operations, audit, consulting, analytics, engineering, science, law, the military, teaching, or something we have not thought of. What matters is the evidence that you think and finish.
• You can write a query. SQL against a warehouse, enough to pull and check a population yourself rather than waiting on someone. This is the single most useful extra thing you could bring.
• You build your own tooling: scripts, automations, agents, dashboards, whatever removes the manual step.
• Experience in consumer finance, credit cards, payments, lending, disputes, rewards, or servicing operations, which is where many of our issue root causes live.
• Experience owning compliance issues, corrective action, remediation, internal audit, compliance testing, or a restitution or make-whole program.
• Experience supporting a regulatory examination or an external audit: assembling evidence, answering follow-up requests on a clock, holding a consistent record across dozens of open items.
• Experience building or maturing a program rather than inheriting a finished one.
• CRCM or another consumer compliance certification.

Skills

Required

• Critical thinking and showing your work
• Working with AI tools in actual work
• Comfortable around data and numbers
• Clear and precise writing
• Willingness to learn regulations
• Self-directed and proactive

Preferred

• SQL query writing

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
• This role has an annual starting salary range of $120,000 to $160,000 plus equity and benefits. Because we are open on level, where an offer lands in that range depends on whether the role is scoped at analyst or manager level for you. Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skills, experience, and specific work location.