Cushion is a venture-backed fintech startup changing how consumers pay their
bills. We’re building a bill-pay platform for the 2020s and beyond, but a bit
more on that later. First, let’s talk about you.
### The role
We’re looking for a driven and scrappy generalist to join us as a Product
Operations Specialist.
As a Product Operations Specialist at Cushion, you will wear several hats to
help our users get the most value possible and provide strategic insights to
improve the product and user experience. You will put yourself in the shoes of
our users, obsessing over every detail of our product and user experience. You
will field customer support tickets, work product admin queues, analyze data
to uncover insights, optimize and automate processes, and present findings and
suggestions to the rest of the team.
The right person for this role will be excited to dive into the trenches and
emerge with insights that impact the company’s trajectory.
You’ll play a pivotal role in shaping the strategy, product, and culture
alongside the Founder and core team. This is a great opportunity if you want
to learn the ins and outs of operating an innovative consumer startup and can
see yourself going deeper into product, operations, analytics, or
entrepreneurship as you grow in your career.
### About you
* You want to get in at the ground floor with an innovative, venture-backed startup
* You’re ambitious; you can see yourself founding your own company someday
* You raise your hand when something needs to be done, even (and especially) when it’s something you’ve never done before
* You have an insatiable desire to learn, expand your skills, and grow; you’re an expert learner
* No task is too big or too small for you; no work is beneath you
* You’re excited about being in the trenches–addressing customer support tickets, troubleshooting technical issues, working product administration queues, data entry, etc.
* And equally excited about coming out of the trenches with new, actionable insights to help improve the product
* You don’t just surface issues, you dig deep to understand why there’s an issue, how prevalent it is, and then come up with a plan to resolve it
* You’re a data-driven systems thinker. You have an instinct to quantify everything.
* You have strong communication skills. You know how to flex your communication style for different audiences.
* After feeling the pain of a broken process, you can’t help but make it more efficient
* You’re comfortable with both the ambiguous and the well-defined
* You’re based in the San Francisco Bay Area and open to joining another member of our team at a WeWork 2-3 times per week
### What you’ll be doing
* Become an expert on our product and user experience
* Field and resolve inbound customer support tickets
* Work through product admin queues to set our users up for success with our ever-evolving product
* Translate user feedback and qualitative insights into actionable next steps
* Report bugs, issues, and product suggestions in a clear, succinct manner
* Present insights and recommendations to the rest of the team
* Monitor, investigate, and prevent financial fraud
* Learn about regulations in consumer finance and implement procedures to ensure Cushion remains compliant
* Create new processes and optimize existing ones to help us scale operations
* Take on ad hoc work that moves the business forward, whether it’s drafting a marketing email, submitting Jira tickets, manually collecting and entering data, or writing an FAQ
* Be expected to balance immediate business impact with scalability and long-term considerations
### Your background
* A college degree
* Experience translating qualitative and quantitative insights into action
* Experience in a customer support, operations, product, or analyst role
* Bonus: Startup experience
* Bonus: Sales, marketing, or copywriting experience
* Bonus: Experience conducting user/customer interviews
* Bonus: Experience working at a fintech or financial institution
* Bonus: Experience with SQL, Python, or R
### Perks
* Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contribution
* Unlimited vacation and sick days
* Competitive salary because we value the best people and talent
* Meaningful equity in an innovative, venture-backed company
* Paid parental leave
### About Cushion
Now a little bit about us.
The world of consumer bills has transformed rapidly over the past few years
and is now more complicated than ever.
One of the most significant contributors to this complexity is the explosive
adoption of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) - think Klarna, Afterpay, Affirm, etc. -
which has led to consumers juggling dozens of additional payments each month
on top of their bills, utilities, and subscriptions.
As a result, tens of millions of Americans are struggling financially, often
missing payments, incurring unnecessary fees and penalties, and harming their
credit scores.
There is a critical gap between the world of bills consumers live in today and
the tools they need to successfully manage their bills and finances.
Enter Cushion.
We spent the past three years building a one-stop shop where consumers can
manage, pay, and build credit with their bills, subscriptions, and Buy Now Pay
Later (BNPL) payments. Since launch, we’ve quickly become the go-to bill-pay
method for our users, now processing over $2M in transactions each month.
What makes Cushion different from the other personal finance apps on the
market is our relentless focus on innovation. Instead of spending cycles
building undifferentiated features, we focus on what’s missing:
* Before switching our focus to bill-pay, we were the **1st company to automate bank fee negotiation**
* We are the **only company that has layered consumers ' BNPL loan schedules into their monthly budgets** alongside their recurring bills, utilities, and subscriptions
* We built a one-of-a-kind calendar sync that **automatically streams due dates and bill statuses to the user’s favorite calendar**
* Instead of limiting our scope to historical transaction data like most fintechs, we go beyond the status quo, tapping unique data sources to provide a more holistic, **forward-looking view of consumers’ finances**
We intend to keep pushing the envelope and filling gaps in the world of
consumer finance and beyond and are looking for folks with big ambition to
join us.
We’re lucky to have an incredibly talented team comprised of folks from
Twitter, Credit Karma, Block, TD Bank, and Bill.com, as well as a team of PhDs
focused on Machine Learning. We’ve raised $21M since 2016 from notable
investors like Rose Park, Flourish Ventures, Vestigo Ventures, Afore Capital,
TSEF, 500 Startups, and the founders of companies like NerdWallet, Earnest,
and Vouch.
Our product and innovation is making noise in the market as well. Our founder,
Paul Kesserwani, has been featured at conferences and on podcasts like [Plaid
Effects](https://plaid.com/events/effects/), [Money
20/20](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paulkesserwani_money2020-buynowpaylater-
activity-7123445047991103488-lhmr), [Leaders in Payments
Podcast](https://leadersinpayments.com/2023/10/02/financial-inclusion-series-
paul-kesserwani-ceo-of-cusion-ai-episode-264-2-2/), [Fintech Layer Cake
Podcast](https://fintechlayercake.buzzsprout.com/1985266/13803529-unraveling-
the-complex-world-of-buy-now-pay-later-with-paul-kesserwani), and [Match
Relevant](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3WCUboDTxs), to name a few. There’s
already a ton of buzz about what we’re doing here at Cushion and we’re just
getting started.
So if you feel like you have what it takes to thrive in a challenging fast-
paced environment with an ambitious team that is changing the way $4 Trillion
worth of bills get paid in America each year, we want to hear from you!
