We couldn’t be happier to announce our newest addition to the leadership team: Pooja Panse.
Pooja has signed on as the Director of Engineering at Kard, where she’ll be heading up our back office team. Partnering with product, account management, and go-to-market, she and her direct reports will be helping Kard prepare for its next phase of growth, designing and refining architecture that will support ever-increasing customer demand.
“Kard has so much valuable data — data that can eliminate a lot of the guesswork in adtech. It’s already differentiated from other Card Linked Offer products on the market with always-on offers. I'm really excited to lead the team as Kard scales and as we work toward our goals of becoming an end-to-end loyalty product driving innovation in how we serve CLOs to all our customers.”
Prior to Kard, Pooja was one of the first engineering managers at Toast, leading the backend payments team — which was instrumental in accelerating Toast’s customer growth. Over the past six years, she and her team developed the credit card processing engine that would power the business of over 100,000 restaurants and fintech products that drove over $3B in revenue. In the time she was there, Pooja helped her team grow from just seven developers to a 135-person organization.
Pooja also comes with deep adtech knowledge, having been an engineer at one of the first startups serving ads on mobile games like Angry Birds. That working environment taught her not only about the adtech ecosystem but also about the importance of building distributed systems that could keep up with the explosion of mobile games on the market, for which advertising was the primary monetization model.
With this vast fintech and adtech knowledge, Pooja is particularly equipped to take Kard’s product to the next level, communicating a solid vision to her team and working cross-functionally to make it happen.
“I like being able to zoom out and see the bird’s eye view, and I take the responsibility of explaining that vision to my team very seriously. Everyone needs to understand the purpose and the mission and the why.”
A self-described “people person,” Pooja also brings years of experience managing individual contributors and managers — not only at Toast but at other startups and even large enterprises like AOL. We’re thrilled to incorporate Pooja’s experiences with hiring, onboarding, increasing efficiency, and other ops-focused talents into the engineering side of the house.
As she describes it:
“What I love most about being a leader is building relationships with the people I work with, creating opportunities for them, and helping them take their career in the direction they want to go.”
Pooja exemplifies the type of employee we look for at Kard — skilled, experienced, humble, motivated — and we’re excited to see what the future brings under her leadership.
About Kard
Kard is the first rewards-as-a-service API to drive loyalty for every cardholder and shopper. Our network of next-generation banks and financial institutions serves a coveted Zillennial, Millennial, and digitally advanced audience, getting merchants in front of the right customers - without spending a fortune. Kard is backed by Tiger Global, Underscore VC, Fin Capital, and s12f. The company made the 2023 Inc. 5000 list and is thrilled to be recognized as one of GGV Capital U.S.'s Fintech Innovation 50. https://www.getkard.com.
