Chief Credit Officer

About Self

Self Financial is a fintech on a mission to expand access to credit for the more than 100 million U.S. consumers who are underserved by traditional lenders. Our product suite — the Credit Builder Account, Self Credit Card, and Self Cash — helps customers establish and strengthen credit while building savings. We have roughly 200 employees, profitable on a path to scale, and in the middle of a strategic evolution: becoming a data and ML/AI company that originates credit intelligently and funds receivables efficiently through the capital markets.

The Chief Credit Officer role sits at the center of that evolution.

The Opportunity

Self serves near-prime and credit-building consumers — a segment where traditional bureau-based underwriting is blunt, where thin files are the norm, and where the spread between a good decision and a bad one is enormous. We have more than a decade of proprietary performance data across our products, a captive view of customer behavior that very few lenders have, and the engineering and data science talent to build something genuinely differentiated.

We are hiring a CCO to build Self into an ML/AI-driven credit decisioning company. This is not a role for someone who wants to manage an existing scorecard. It is a role for someone who believes — and can prove — that modern modeling applied to the credit-building segment can compound into a durable advantage, and who has the technical depth and organizational credibility to make it happen inside a regulated fintech.

Year-One Mandate

In the first twelve months, the CCO will:

• Stand up a modern, ML-driven credit decisioning stack across the Self Credit Card — moving us from heuristic and legacy scorecard logic to models that learn from our proprietary data.
• Partner with the CFO and capital markets team to translate credit performance and model transparency into terms that unlock more efficient receivables funding — lower advance rates, tighter spreads, broader investor base.
• Build the governance, documentation, and model risk management discipline required to run ML credit models in a CFPB-regulated environment, including fair lending testing, adverse action explainability, and ongoing monitoring.
• Lead, develop, and selectively upgrade the existing credit team — roughly 12 people across risk, analytics, and collections — and establish the operating rhythm that connects credit strategy to product, finance, and the board.

Ongoing Responsibilities

Credit Strategy & ML/AI Decisioning

• Own the end-to-end credit risk strategy across all Self products — acquisition underwriting, line assignment, pricing, account management, and collections.
• Drive the design, training, validation, and deployment of ML-based credit models, in partnership with our data science and engineering teams. Set the technical bar for what 'good' looks like.
• Use our proprietary data — payment behavior, account trajectory, cross-product signals — as the core asset in a decisioning system that competitors cannot replicate from bureau data alone.
• Develop loss forecasting and portfolio analytics that are trusted by the board, auditors, and capital partners.

Portfolio & Capital Markets

• Manage the performance of a multi-product receivables portfolio spanning credit-building and near-prime segments.
• Work directly with the CFO and structured finance team on warehouse facilities, forward flow arrangements, and securitization — translating credit performance into capital markets terms and vice versa.
• Serve as a credible voice with lenders, rating agencies, and investors on model methodology, portfolio construction, and loss expectations.

Policy, Governance & Fair Lending

• Own credit policy end to end, with documentation and controls that meet the standard expected of a regulated consumer lender.
• Ensure compliance with CFPB expectations, fair lending requirements, ECOA, FCRA, UDAAP, and state-level consumer credit regulations.
• Establish a model risk management framework — including explainability, disparate impact testing, and challenger model discipline — that lets us move fast with ML without compromising on rigor.

Collections & Customer Outcomes

• Direct collections strategy with the dual objective of minimizing losses and producing good outcomes for customers who are, by design, early in their credit journey.
• Manage relationships with third-party servicers, bureaus, data providers, and decisioning vendors.

Leadership & Cross-Functional Partnership

• Lead the existing credit organization. Raise the bar on analytical depth, technical sophistication, and execution speed.
• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Finance, Compliance, and Legal. Credit at Self is not a gatekeeping function — it is a product input.
• Report regularly to the CEO and board on portfolio health, model performance, and strategic initiatives.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 10+ years in consumer credit risk, with meaningful time in fintech or direct-to-consumer lending.
• Direct, hands-on experience building and deploying ML/AI-based credit decisioning models — not just sponsoring them. You should be able to go deep on model architecture, feature engineering, validation approach, and fair lending testing.
• Fluency in capital markets and structured finance as they apply to consumer receivables: warehouse facilities, securitization, forward flow, rating agency interactions. You understand how credit performance translates into financing cost.
• Proven track record in the near-prime, subprime, or credit-building segments. You understand the customer, the unit economics, and the regulatory attention these segments attract.
• Deep working knowledge of CFPB, ECOA, FCRA, Fair Lending, and UDAAP as they apply to algorithmic underwriting.
• Strong leadership presence with the ability to operate as a peer to the CEO, CFO, and board — and the credibility to represent Self externally with regulators, lenders, and investors.

Strongly Preferred

• Experience leading a credit function through a strategic transition — portfolio remediation, platform modernization, or a shift in funding strategy.
• Prior experience at a company that sits at the intersection of analytics and lending — for example, a credit card company, a credit-focused fintech, or a bank's digital consumer lending arm.

Why Self, Why Now

Self is at an inflection point. The portfolio is large enough to matter, the data is proprietary, the product surface is expanding, and the capital markets opportunity is real. The CCO who joins now will set the credit foundation for the next phase of the company — and will own, end to end, the single function most responsible for whether that phase succeeds.

If you have spent a career waiting for a role where modern ML credit modeling, a mission-aligned customer base, and direct capital markets leverage come together in one seat — this is that role.

This is an executive level position and individual pay is based on factors unique to each candidate, including skill set, experience, and other job-related reasons.