Head of Fraud Operations

Head of Fraud Operations 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 Head of Fraud Operations to build and lead the operational core of our fraud function. This is a player-coach role: you'll lead a team of fraud analysts and investigators while staying close enough to the work to shape how cases are handled, how tools are used, and how the function scales. Reporting to our Chief Risk Officer, you'll own two critical functions 1. Manual review operations 2. Fraud investigations You will be responsible for the people, processes, and tooling that make both run effectively. You'll partner closely with our Fraud Strategy Managers to translate decisioning policy into operational reality, and with Product and Engineering to continuously improve the analyst experience and case management infrastructure. This is a high-ownership role in a fast-growing environment. You'll be expected to drive operational excellence today while building the foundation for a fraud ops function that scales with Cardless. WHAT YOU'LL OWN Team Leadership & Development - Build, manage, and develop a team of fraud analysts and investigators: responsible for hiring, onboarding, training, scheduling, and performance management. - Create a high-performance team culture grounded in accuracy, accountability, and continuous learning. - Define clear performance standards, quality metrics, and career paths for analysts and investigators at each level. - Serve as a player-coach: you'll be hands-on in complex cases, calibration sessions, and quality reviews — not just managing from a distance. Manual Review Operations - Own the day-to-day execution of the manual review program for onboarding and account-level events, ensuring queues are managed, SLAs are met, and case quality is high. - Work closely with the Fraud Strategy – Onboarding team to operationalize routing logic, decision criteria, and escalation paths; translate policy into analyst-ready playbooks and SOPs. - Monitor analyst decision quality through regular audits and calibration; identify training gaps and address them quickly. - Evaluate the tools analysts use to conduct reviews — surface gaps, advocate for improvements, and partner with vendors and Engineering to close them. - Track and report on manual review performance: throughput, SLA adherence, decision accuracy, reversal rates, and downstream fraud on reviewed cases. Fraud Investigations - Own the fraud investigations function: responsible for scoping, working, and closing cases involving complex fraud patterns, suspected fraud rings, account takeover events, and high-loss incidents. - Define investigation methodology and standards: how cases are triaged, documented, escalated, and resolved. - Lead investigations on high-severity or high-exposure cases personally; ensure the team has the skills, tools, and access needed to investigate effectively. - Partner with the Fraud Strategy – Transactions team to feed investigation findings back into detection rules and model features. - Maintain SAR filing readiness and ensure the team understands BSA/AML obligations related to fraud investigations; coordinate with Compliance on filing decisions. Operational Excellence & Scaling - Build and maintain the SOPs, playbooks, and decision frameworks that enable the team to operate consistently and ind ... (truncated, view full listing at source)