Earnest

Director, Credit Risk

Remote - US Full Time

Earnest empowers ambitious professionals to make confident financial decisions and build the life they envision.

Earnies 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 more below, and let’s build something great together. 

Earnest LLC – Oakland, CA

Title: Director, Credit Risk

Duties:

  • The Director, Credit Risk at Earnest LLC in Oakland, CA will lead the development, deployment, testing, monitoring, and optimization of the credit strategies of the lending products offered by Earnest LLC, including Personal Loan, or Student Loan Refinance, or Private Student Loans.

  • Analyze the industry's lending products, our applications and portfolio to drive the best return for the product, and serve on the Credit Team, whose primary mission is to grow the lending revenue responsibly to maximize profit within the company’s risk appetite.

  • Design data-based credit strategies for pre-screening, underwriting, risk tiering, loan amount assignment, and verifications to drive credit optimization.

  • Partner with the Data Science team to design new machine learning risk models.

  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to accurately deploy new strategies, and evaluate new data sources and models to improve the strategy risk separation.

  • Lead the process for establishing target metrics and expectations, and constantly monitor and evaluate the strategies and portfolio performance.

  • Identify gaps and issues, and solve business problems.

  • Lead the team to conduct monitoring analyses and identify opportunities for continuous enhancement and optimization.

  • Continuously improve existing processes and funnel conversions; and 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; and manage multiple projects with cross-functional stakeholders simultaneously set priorities, and meet deadlines.

  • Work with cross-function teams to deliver successful business results.

  • Deliver insights into product design and functionality to align product construction with Earnest’s risk tolerance.

  • Work cross-functionally with the Product and Analytics squads to build experiments to drive risk-adjusted returns.

  • Coordinate with the Capital Markets, Analytics, and FP&A teams to ensure that expected portfolio performance is accurately reflected.

  • Develop diligence materials to support the execution of 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.  

 

Position is 100% remote.


Requirements:

  • Master’s degree in Finance, Mathematics, or a closely related field

  • 7 years of experience as a risk manager or related occupation in the consumer lending industry;

  • Including 7 years of experience with each of the following:

  • developing data-driven credit strategies for lending products, including pre-screening, underwriting, risk tiering, loan amount assignment, and verifications;

  • modeling techniques, including decision trees, logistic regression, gradient boosting models and other 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, including Looker or Tableau.

This notice is subject to Earnest LLC's employee referral program.

Interested candidates can apply online at www.earnest.com/careers [earnest.com] or send a resume to
directrecruiting@earnest.com and reference job code 064.

A little about our pay philosophy: We take pride in compensating our employees fairly and equitably. We are showcasing a range of your potential base salary based on the roles location. The successful candidate’s starting pay will also be determined based on job-related qualifications, internal compensation, candidate location and budget. This range may be modified in the future.

Salary Range
$298,022$298,022 USD

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 to set up your home office
  • Monthly internet and phone reimbursement
  • Employee Stock Purchase Plan
  • Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
  • 401(k) plan to help you save for retirement plus a company match
  • Robust tuition reimbursement program
  • $1,000 travel perk on each Earnie-versary to anywhere in the world 
  • Competitive days of annual 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. Our customers need better solutions, and the faster we execute, the greater our chance of success.
  • Choose To Do Hard Things: We win by tackling the hard things that others avoid, fueled by grit and resilience.
  • Pursue Excellence: Great companies, teams, and individuals never settle and are proud of the work that they do. What’s good enough today won’t be good enough tomorrow. Excellence isn’t a destination; it’s a mindset of continuous improvement.
  • Lead Together: Our success comes from how we work together. Leadership is not about titles—it is about action. We take ownership, drive results, and move forward as a team.
  • Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously: We take our work seriously, not ourselves. The stakes are high, but a sense of humor keeps us grounded, creative, and resilient.

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 for the position in a manner consistent with the Fair Chance Ordinance.