Best suited to cross-functional designers with a systems mindset working in financial product infrastructure.
Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.
Original posting from Cardless via Ashby
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
This isn’t a typical product design role. Some days you’ll craft an interface, on others you’ll untangle a workflow, shape a policy, map a complex system, or find the words that make it all click. Your work might live in an API or documentation that helps a customer build, in the flow a cardholder moves through when their card is frozen, or in the tool an employee uses to make things right. Your job is to see how all those pieces fit together - and turn complexity behind the scenes into something simple, clear, and human.
Because customers build their products on top of ours, designers here constantly decide where Cardless should offer flexibility and where we should take a clear position on how something ought to work. A solution may need to serve a customer’s product team, feel native to their brand, make sense to a cardholder, and work for the teams operating it behind the scenes. That means designing systems and patterns and explaining them clearly enough that others can build from them.
You’ll work directly with Engineering, Product, Compliance, and operational teams to make ideas tangible. You won’t always receive a neat brief or hand off a finished Figma file. You’ll help define the problem, iterate across whatever medium fits, use AI to explore, and stay involved as the work meets reality.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Your work will span across Cardless. Here are a few of the systems and experiences you’ll help shape:
- Design a system of components and flows that customers can embed in their own product across web and mobile, from a single flow (opening an account, submitting a dispute, making a payment) to an end-to-end financial product.
- Turn our interactions with customers into a product: design the documentation, communication, and tooling that shape how their teams onboard, get support, and work with Cardless over time.
- Partner with Sales to make new ideas tangible through prototypes and demos. Shape the website, decks, and other ways we tell the Cardless story consistently.
- Partner with Engineering to create a great developer experience: integration guides, reference examples, and a playbook covering every state a customer’s team needs to implement.
- Embed yourself in one of Support, Compliance, Fraud, Disputes, and Ops. Learn how the work gets done, then design the customer touchpoints, communications, processes, workflows, and internal tools as one system - and use AI to help prototype, build, and iterate on this.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- We don’t require any specific experience for this role. We care much more about how you think, the problems you’ve taken on, and what you’ve made real. Show us shipped products, rough prototypes, system diagrams, documentation, workflows, or even a messy Figma file - whatever best demonstrates your judgment and craft. That said, we do require:
- Strong product reasoning. You know when to create flexibility and when to take a clear position on how something should work.
- Clear writing and storytelling. You know how to take a complicated idea, find what matters, and explain it simply.
- You can get deep, fast. You learn complex domains, move between different modes of work, and develop the context to make good decisions.
- Technical curiosity. You care about the developer experience at the level of language and concepts.
- Exceptional visual craft. Your work sets a standard and gives others a reference to build from.
- A hunger to shape what comes next. AI is changing how designers work, and you want to help invent the new playbook. You use tools like Cursor, Codex, or Claude Code to make ideas real. When a tool, workflow, or system is missing, you build it for yourself and the team.
COMPENSATION
This role has an annual starting salary range of $175,000–$275,000 + 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.
Source: Cardless careers (Ashby)