Director of Underwriting

This is a direct hire opportunity

1st shift, offering two remote days.

$165,000-$175,000

Director of Credit Strategy & Underwriting

Position Overview

A growing consumer finance company is seeking a strategic, analytically driven Director of Credit Strategy & Underwriting to lead the continued evolution of its organization. The primary objective of this role is to maximize profitable loan approvals through intelligent automation, advanced credit analytics, risk-based pricing, and streamlined verification and documentation processes. The successful candidate will balance growth and credit quality while continuously identifying opportunities to improve approval rates, accelerate decisioning, reduce underwriting costs, and enhance the dealer and borrower experience.

This is a hands-on leadership role requiring a combination of strategic vision, strong analytical capabilities, technical understanding, and proven credit and underwriting management experience.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the strategic development, implementation, testing, and continuous optimization of Vera, the company's AI-enabled underwriting platform, and automated decisioning capabilities within Skeps.
• Develop, enhance, and manage credit decision models, scorecards, underwriting rules, risk segmentation, and automated approval strategies.
• Increase the percentage of applications receiving immediate automated credit decisions while reducing manual underwriting requirements and maintaining or improving portfolio performance.
• Develop intelligent approval and risk-based pricing strategies that expand access to credit, including borrowers with FICO scores as low as 600, while meeting targeted risk-adjusted returns.
• Establish appropriate model governance, validation, monitoring, explainability, fair lending controls, and adverse action procedures.

Credit Policy, Approval Optimization & Risk-Based Pricing

• Own, develop, and continuously refine the company's consumer credit policies, underwriting guidelines, and risk management framework.
• Optimize approval strategies across credit tiers, dealers, and products to maximize profitable originations while balancing weighted-average coupon (WAC), weighted-average FICO, expected credit losses, and contribution margins.
• Develop and implement risk-based pricing strategies that account for expected losses, cost of funds, servicing expenses, dealer economics, and targeted profitability.
• Analyze competitive market conditions and market-clearing pricing to develop programs that strengthen the company's competitive position and attract profitable dealer relationships.
• Regularly evaluate the effectiveness of credit policies and make data-driven recommendations to executive leadership.

Underwriting Operations & Team Leadership

• Lead, develop, and manage the manual underwriting team, establishing a high-performance culture focused on accountability, productivity, accuracy, and customer service.
• Oversee underwriting workflows and decisioning processes across the company's loan origination platforms, including Skeps and EZ Originate.
• Manage underwriting staffing, scheduling, capacity planning, and service levels to support business operations during established underwriting hours
• Establish and monitor key operational performance metrics, including application turnaround times, underwriting productivity, approval consistency, escalation rates, and quality standards.
• Develop training programs, performance management processes, and career development opportunities for underwriting personnel.

Loan Processing, Verification & Quality Assurance

• Lead strategic initiatives to reduce approval stipulations and unnecessary documentation requirements, improving dealer conversion, borrower experience, and funding speed.
• Leverage third-party data providers and electronic verification solutions to automate the verification of income, employment, identity, residence, and property ownership, where appropriate.
• Reduce reliance on traditional documentation, including pay stubs, bank statements, and proof of residence, through reliable alternative verification methods.
• Increase the percentage of final, stipulation-free approvals without compromising fraud controls or credit quality.
• Establish and monitor stipulation metrics by credit tier, dealer, product, and verification type.
• Evaluate the impact of verification requirements on funding conversion, fraud exposure, credit losses, processing costs, and dealer satisfaction.
• Develop quality assurance scorecards and controls to monitor underwriting exceptions, documentation deficiencies, fraud indicators, and processing errors.
• Establish corrective action procedures to address recurring quality issues, ope