Director, Communications

Responsibilities

• Build and Maintain Press Relationships
• - Build and maintain relationships with the reporters, editors, and outlets who cover fintech, payments, and the consumer brands Cardless partners with — before you need something from them, not just when a launch is imminent.
• - Understand each outlet's beat and angle well enough to pitch stories they'll actually want, instead of sending the same release to everyone on a list.
• - Track the trade and business press landscape closely enough to know who's writing about card programs, co-brand partnerships, and embedded finance right now.
• - Represent Cardless credibly in direct conversations with press — on background, on the record, and everything in between.
• Drive Executive Visibility
• - Identify and pursue the interviews, bylines, panels, and speaking opportunities that put Cardless leadership in front of the audiences that matter.
• - Prepare executives for press interactions — talking points, likely questions, and the version of the story that's true and compelling at the same time.
• - Build a cadence of thought leadership that reinforces Cardless's positioning over time, rather than one-off appearances with no throughline.
• - Work with Product Marketing to make sure what executives say publicly matches what the company says everywhere else.

Requirements

• Media Relationships: You already have real relationships with reporters and editors who cover fintech, payments, or the consumer brand space — not a list of names, but people who take your calls.
• News Judgment: You know what's actually a story and what isn't, and you can shape a company update into something a reporter wants to write.
• Executive Prep: You can sit with an executive before a big interview and make them sound sharper and more confident than they would on their own.
• Writing: You write clean, fast, accurate press materials — releases, statements, talking points — without needing multiple rounds of rewrites.
• Cross-Functional Coordination: You can run a joint announcement with a partner's comms team, and with Cardless's own product and partnerships teams, without dropping a detail or missing a deadline.
• Composure Under Pressure: You stay level-headed and clear-eyed when a story isn't going the way anyone wanted, and you respond rather than react.

Preferred

• You want to direct an agency rather than do the pitching, writing, and relationship-building yourself — this role is hands-on, not managerial.
• You think of PR as something that happens after the news is made — this role needs to be shaping how and when news happens in the first place.
• You're only comfortable with planned, scripted moments — a real week here includes coverage you didn't ask for and have to respond to quickly.
• You want PR and product marketing to operate independently — this role needs to be in lockstep with Product Marketing so the public story matches the sales story.
• You're uncomfortable being the person who tells an excited internal team a launch isn't ready for press yet — sometimes the job is holding the line on timing.

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