Director, Credit Risk

Earnest empowers ambitious professionals to make confident financial decisions and build the life they envision. Earniest are committed to helping borrowers move forward with confidence by offering smarter borrowing options with a clearer path to taking control of their debt. If you're as passionate as we are about our mission, read on.

Duties:

• Lead the development, deployment, testing, monitoring, and optimization of credit strategies for Earnest LLC's lending products (Personal Loan, Student Loan Refinance, Private Student Loans).
• Analyze industry lending products, applications, and portfolios to drive optimal product returns and serve on the Credit Team, aiming to grow lending revenue responsibly within the company's risk appetite.
• Design data-driven credit strategies for pre-screening, underwriting, risk tiering, loan amount assignment, and verifications to optimize credit.
• Partner with the Data Science team to design new machine learning risk models.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams for accurate strategy deployment and to evaluate new data sources and models for improved risk separation.
• Lead the establishment of target metrics and expectations, continuously monitoring and evaluating strategy and portfolio performance.
• Identify gaps and issues, and solve business problems.
• Lead the team in conducting monitoring analyses and identifying opportunities for continuous enhancement and optimization.
• Continuously improve existing processes and funnel conversions; communicate results, insights, and recommendations to senior leadership and business partners.
• Lead, support, and develop team members.
• Serve as a key participant in risk team hiring.
• Mentor other analysts on risk analytics; manage multiple projects with cross-functional stakeholders, prioritize effectively, and meet deadlines.
• Work with cross-functional teams to deliver successful business results.
• Provide insights into product design and functionality to align product construction with Earnest's risk tolerance.
• Work cross-functionally with Product and Analytics squads to build experiments driving risk-adjusted returns.
• Coordinate with Capital Markets, Analytics, and FP&A teams to ensure accurate reflection of expected portfolio performance.
• Develop diligence materials to support business transactions and provide analysis results to management and external ratings agencies.
• Telecommuting permitted up to five days per week, but must live in the Oakland, California area.

Requirements:

• Master's degree in Finance, Mathematics, or a closely related field.
• Including 7 years of experience with each of the following:
  • Developing data-driven credit strategies for lending products (pre-screening, underwriting, risk tiering, loan amount assignment, verifications).
  • Modeling techniques (decision trees, logistic regression, gradient boosting models, machine learning models).
  • Analyzing customer performance data, bureau attributes, and other third-party variables to solve business problems.
  • Building underwriting risk scores.
  • Cash flow financial modeling and lending products' P&L evaluation.
  • Loss forecast methodology and portfolio management.
  • Excel, SQL, and Python.
  • A/B testing.
  • Business intelligence tools (Looker or Tableau).

Pay Philosophy:

We take pride in compensating our employees fairly and equitably. The salary range for this position is $298,022/year. The successful candidate's starting pay will be determined based on job-related qualifications, internal compensation, candidate location, and budget. This range may be modified in the future.

Earnest believes in enabling our employees to live their best lives. We offer a variety of perks and competitive benefits, including:

• Health, Dental, & Vision benefits plus savings plans
• Mac computers + work-from-home stipend
• Monthly internet and phone reimbursement
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
• 401(k) plan with company match
• Robust tuition reimbursement program
• $1,000 travel perk on each Earnie-versary
• Competitive PTO
• Competitive parental leave

What Makes an Earnie:

At Earnest, our people bring our cultural principles to life. These principles define how we work, how we win, and what we expect of ourselves and each other:

• Every Second Counts : Speed is our competitive advantage.
• Choose To Do Hard Things : We win by tackling the hard things others avoid.
• Pursue Excellence : We never settle and are proud of our work.
• Lead Together : Our success comes from how we work together.
• Don't Take Yourself Too Seriously : We take our work seriously, not ourselves.

At Earnest, we are committed to building an environment where our employees feel included, valued, and heard. Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging enables us to move forward with our mission. We are dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and encourage anyone to apply if your experience is close to what we are looking for.

Earnest provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or genetics. Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered in a manner consistent with the Fair Chance Ordinance.