Credit Risk Oversight Director - Student Loans & RCSA

The role:

The SoFi Credit Oversight team is responsible for managing credit risk across all lending products (Student Loan Refinance, Private Student Loan, Personal Loan, Credit Card, and Mortgage). This includes developing credit strategies and policies for new account origination, portfolio management, collections, and recovery operations, as well as providing oversight of operational controls.

The Director is responsible for overseeing credit risk activities for Student Lending (Student Loan Refinance & Private InSchool products) and will review and challenge strategy proposals to ensure growth is consistent with the company’s risk appetite. The role demands a strong analytical mindset, critical thinking skills, and a self-starting approach.

Key responsibilities include:

• Proactive Monitoring and Strategy Enhancement: Proactively engage with First Line partners, independently monitor strategies and performance, and leverage business acumen, credit experience, and quantitative skills to deliver data-informed insights and recommendations for strategy enhancement opportunities.

• Governance and Operational Controls: Lead the governance and oversight of operational controls supporting credit strategy changes, ensuring strong change management, data integrity, and strict adherence to risk and compliance standards across all lending portfolios.

• Risk and Control Self-Assessments (RCSA): Challenge and strengthen first line RCSA processes by providing effective second line oversight, identifying control gaps, and driving remediation to enhance the overall control environment.  Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner cross-functionally with Credit, Operations, and Risk teams to enhance control design, monitoring, and sustainable risk management practices.

The ideal candidate will possess a data-driven analytics background, strategic acumen, and a controls mindset. This expertise will support SoFi’s overarching strategic goals for loss prevention and profit optimization. Furthermore, the Director is expected to drive innovation by introducing new ways of thinking, data sources, technologies, and capabilities to SoFi.

What you’ll do:

• Innovate… Bring your brightest ideas to independently review and challenge algorithmic risk strategies, including but not limited to credit underwriting, pre-screen targeting & risk tier assignment. 

• Data Driven… Your deep analysis will power insight-gathering

• Iterate, learn, innovate… We are all responsible for innovation and must embrace a test-and-learn mentality and data-driven decision making.

• Collaborate… Work collaboratively with business partners to ensure optimal decision making to protect the Bank

• Control the Risk and Drive Performance Outcomes … Understand credit risk and develop approaches to mitigate loss and responsibly grow revenue. Independently monitor the performance of strategies and portfolios. Document and communicate results and escalate issues as necessary. Identify gaps/opportunities and drive actions.

• Challenge the Status Quo … Challenge others, continuously raise the bar, build better processes and attack hard problems to help First Line Credit team and the business build responsible strategies within risk appetite

What you’ll need:

• 10+ years of related experience

• Business acumen and work experience in the consumer lending business (Student Lending - preferred, Unsecured loans or credit cards)

• Direct experience in the credit strategy analytical life cycle, including strategy and decision tree development, P&L, presentation, review and challenge, and post-implementation monitoring

• Proven analytical skills in conducting sophisticated analysis using customer performance data, bureau attributes, bureau analytical sandboxes and other 3rd party variables to solve business problems

• Proficient data exploration and credit modeling skills in Excel, SQL and Python

• A demonstrated ability to synthesize and communicate analysis to business partners and senior management

• Proactive, results-driven, eager to learn, and able to work collaboratively in a fluid environment

• Knowledge/skills in analytical and modeling techniques such as decision trees, regression, logistic regression, test design

• Preferred: Experience in developing credit strategies using innovative data sources such as cash flow or alternative data

• Preferred: Advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) with a quantitative major such as Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or Computer Science