About Upstart
Upstart is the leading AI lending marketplace partnering with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit. By leveraging Upstart's AI marketplace, Upstart-powered banks and credit unions can have higher approval rates and lower loss rates across races, ages, and genders, while simultaneously delivering the exceptional digital-first lending experience their customers demand. More than 80% of borrowers are approved instantly, with zero documentation to upload.
Upstart is a digital-first company, which means that most Upstarters live and work anywhere in the United States. However, we also have offices in San Mateo, California; Columbus, Ohio; and Austin, Texas.
Most Upstarters join us because they connect with our mission of enabling access to effortless credit based on true risk. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Upstart, we’d love to hear from you!
The Pricing team is responsible for building a best-in-class underwriting platform to quickly and accurately create loan offers for all of Upstart’s loan products like Personal Loans, Auto loans and Home loans. The services owned by the team are responsible for validating applicant data, interfacing with Machine Learning models to calculate borrower risk, and calculating interest rates, fees, etc. We are developing new capabilities for Upstart’s loan products and building a next generation software platform to accelerate innovation on behalf of our customers.
As a Director of Engineering, you will define and drive the long-term vision for our pricing systems. In this highly visible role, you’ll partner with leaders across Product, Machine Learning, Compliance, and Operations to ensure pricing is not just an engine for growth, but also a strategic differentiator for Upstart. You’ll lead multiple engineering teams, set a high bar for excellence, and shape the culture that empowers our engineers to innovate at scale.
How You’ll Make an Impact- Set Vision and Strategy: Define and communicate the long-term strategy for the pricing platform, ensuring alignment with company objectives, evolving regulatory standards, and customer needs.
- Build and Scale Teams: Grow and mentor a high-performing, diverse engineering team and an effective management layer. Foster a culture of accountability, technical rigor, customer-centric thinking, and continuous improvement.
- Drive Technical Excellence: Guide architectural decisions and oversee the delivery of scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure that accelerates pricing innovation and simplifies compliance.
- Cross-Functional Leadership: Collaborate with Product, ML, Infrastructure, Compliance, Legal, and Analytics leaders to drive cohesive execution. Act as a thought partner and technical advisor to senior stakeholders across the company.
- Operational Execution: Establish processes and metrics that ensure high-quality, timely delivery. Drive clarity across multiple workstreams and proactively identify and manage technical and organizational risks. Ensure pricing systems are reliable, performant, and compliant, while enabling faster iteration of ML-driven products.
- Influence Organizational Outcomes: Shape engineering-wide practices and contribute to Upstart's broader technology strategy as a senior member of the Engineering leadership team.
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, with 7+ years in engineering leadership roles.
- Proven success leading and scaling high-performing engineering teams, including managing other managers.
- Deep experience building large-scale, cloud-based distributed systems, ideally in fintech, pricing, or ML-based product environments.
- Strong understanding of modern software engineering practices, microservice architectures, and CI/CD.
- Hands-on experience with cloud technologies (AWS, GCP, or Azure), containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), and scalable API design.
- Exceptional communication skills with the ability to influence technical and non-technical audiences, including executive leadership.
- Strong analytical, organizational, and strategic thinking skills with a bias for action.
- Background in statistics, economics, or applied ML.
- Track record of shipping dynamic Pricing platforms or Fintech infrastructure at scale.
- Experience leading platform or infrastructure teams in high-growth or regulated environments.
- Strong product mindset with the ability to evaluate trade-offs and drive prioritization decisions based on customer and business impact.
- Experience designing and evolving microservice-based architectures.
- Demonstrated ability to lead through influence in a matrixed or cross-functional environment.
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity while scaling organizations, systems, and processes.
At Upstart, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package. The anticipated base salary for this position is expected to be within the below range. Your actual base pay will depend on your geographic location–with our “digital first” philosophy, Upstart uses compensation regions that vary depending on location. Individual pay is also determined by job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.
In addition, Upstart provides employees with target bonuses, equity compensation, and generous benefits packages (including medical, dental, vision, and 401k).
Upstart is a proud Equal Opportunity Employer. We are dedicated to ensuring that underrepresented classes receive better access to affordable credit, and are just as committed to embracing diversity and inclusion in our hiring practices. We celebrate all cultures, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences, and know that we can only become better together.
If you require reasonable accommodation in completing an application, interviewing, completing any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participating in the employee selection process, please email [email protected]
https://www.upstart.com/candidate_privacy_policy
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