Payments & Risk Operations Manager

Cantina.ai is building a commerce business with subscriptions, credits, and payments. You'll own customer support and payments risk operations for this new function, working alongside product, engineering, and operations leadership who are already invested in getting it right. This role starts as an individual contributor with high ownership; as the business scales, you'll help shape how the team grows.

What you'll do

• Own day-to-day customer support across eCommerce, handling billing questions, cancellations, refunds, credit balance and top-up issues, failed or disputed payments, access issues, and general customer inquiries.
• Own payments risk operations by monitoring fraud, refund abuse, disputes and chargeback patterns; investigating anomalous transaction and account behavior; developing policies and controls that balance loss prevention with a low-friction customer experience; and partnering with Product, Engineering and your payment provider on improvements.
• Create and maintain the support playbook, including workflows, macros, escalation paths, and SLAs across subscriptions, credits, and payments, working closely with stakeholders across Product, Engineering, and Operations.
• Leverage and manage the payment platform relationship, owning billing operations day to day including disputes, chargebacks, failed payments, refund workflows, credit and balance adjustments, and reconciliation questions, coordinating with Finance as needed.
• Leverage and manage the outsourced operations relationship as the primary point of contact with your outsourced operations team for surge and overflow support capacity, including onboarding agents, maintaining documentation and macros, monitoring quality, and adjusting volume commitments.
• Escalate effectively by recognizing which cases need to go beyond you-to Product or Engineering for a bug or root-cause fix, to Finance for a billing exception, or to leadership for a judgment call.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to surface recurring support themes, bugs, and friction points; represent the voice of the customer in roadmap conversations; and validate fixes before they ship.
• Track and report on support health by owning core support metrics including response time, resolution time, CSAT, ticket volume and drivers by category, and cost per ticket.
• Scale the model by helping determine when and how to bring on additional internal headcount versus leaning further on outsourced operations, and build out tooling like help desk platforms, macros, and self-serve content as needed.

What you bring

• 3-7 years of experience in payments operations, payments risk, fraud operations, billing operations, or customer operations for a high-volume consumer product, with hands-on experience resolving complex customer cases.
• Experience with payments risk, fraud operations, disputes and chargebacks, or transaction monitoring in a consumer subscription, marketplace, gaming, virtual currency/credits, or digital goods business.
• Direct, hands-on experience actually working support tickets, not just managing a team that does.
• Experience working with a payments or billing platform such as Stripe and comfort navigating billing edge cases like disputes, refunds, and failed payments.
• Ability to operate cross-functionally with Product and Engineering by translating ticket and account patterns into clear, prioritized, data-informed feedback they'll actually act on.
• A builder's mindset, energized by implementing a process where none exists yet and comfortable doing so alongside others across the company who are already invested in getting it right.
• Strong written communication, as you'll be writing macros, documentation, and escalation summaries that other people, including vendor agents, rely on.
• Comfort with ambiguity and change, as this function will look different in six months and you'll be shaping that evolution.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment with minimal structure or oversight, setting priorities with your manager without needing daily check-ins to stay on track.

Nice to have

• Experience managing or coordinating with a BPO or outsourced support vendor such as TaskUs through standard operational KPIs.
• Strong data skills, including ability to use dashboards to track metrics, do basic investigations to spot and explore problems, and build or edit SQL queries or willingness and ability to learn.
• Experience optimizing workflows and processes by building or utilizing AI agents.

About Cantina

Cantina Labs is a social AI company developing advanced real-time models that bring characters to life and transform how people tell stories, connect, and create.