Chief Credit Officer

Self Financial•Austin, TX

21h•Remote

About The Position

Self Financial is a venture-backed, high-growth FinTech company with a mission to increase economic inclusion and financial resilience by empowering people to build credit and build savings. We're looking for people who share our passion and are driven to tackle challenges, find solutions and make the financial space better for the communities we serve. Our team is passionate about challenging the status quo of the credit industry by providing people accessible tools to take control of their credit. Executing on our mission requires deep collaboration across our teams to ensure our products reach the people who can benefit from them the most, particularly the 100 million+ Americans who have no or low credit. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. To that end, we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool. 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.

Requirements

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.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.