Payments & Risk Operations Manager

About Cantina
Cantina Labs is a social AI company, developing a suite of advanced real-time models that push the boundaries of expression, personality, and realism. We bring characters to life, transforming how people tell stories, connect, and create. We build and power ecosystems. Cantina, our flagship social AI platform, is just the beginning.
If you're excited about the potential AI has to shape human creativity and social interactions, join us in building the future!
About the Role
Cantina.ai is building a commerce business—subscriptions, credits, and payments—and we're looking for the person who will own customer support for it.
You won't be doing this alone. Executives and teammates across Product, Engineering, and Operations are already invested in getting this right. Your job is to turn that focus into a support function that actually works, day to day.
Early on, that means rolling up your sleeves: working tickets yourself, building the first workflows, and getting a system in place fast. As volume grows, you'll shift toward setting direction, managing our vendor partners for billing and payments and overflow customer support capacity, and knowing which cases need Product, Engineering, or leadership rather than your own hands.
We think this is a great fit for someone 3-7 years into their career who's run support or support ops before, enjoys building something new alongside people who care about it, and wants real ownership over how it takes shape.
The role reports into Operations and works closely with the Product and Engineering teams behind subscriptions. It starts as an individual contributor role with high ownership; and as the business scales, you'll help decide whether and how the team grows with it.
What You'll Do
- Own day-to-day customer support across eCommerce. Handle billing questions, cancellations, refunds, credit balance and top-up issues, failed or disputed payments, access issues, and general customer inquiries directly, especially early on while volume is low and workflows are still taking shape.

- Own payments risk operations. Monitor fraud, refund abuse, disputes and chargeback patterns; investigate anomalous transaction and account behavior; develop policies and operational controls that balance loss prevention with a low-friction customer experience; and partner with Product, Engineering and our payment provider on improvements to authorization, fraud prevention and dispute performance.

- Create and maintain the playbook. Build support workflows, macros, escalation paths, and SLAs across subscriptions, credits, and payments, working closely with the executives and teammates across Product, Engineering, and Operations who are also focused on getting this right.

- Leverage and manage the payment platform relationship. Own billing operations with our payments platform day to day—disputes, chargebacks, failed payments, refund workflows, credit/balance adjustments, and reconciliation questions—coordinating with Finance as needed.

- Leverage and manage the outsourced operations relationship. Serve as the primary point of contact with our outsourced operations team for surge/overflow support capacity, including onboarding their agents, maintaining documentation and macros they'll use, monitoring quality, and adjusting volume commitments as demand fluctuates.

- Escalate effectively. Recognize 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—and route them clearly rather than trying to resolve everything solo.

- Partner with Product and Engineering. Surface recurring support themes, bugs, and friction points; represent the voice of the customer in roadmap conversations; validate fixes before they ship.

- Track and report on support health. Own core support metrics (response time, resolution time, CSAT, ticket volume/drivers by category, cost per ticket) and report on them r