Director, Small Business Credit Underwriting

Fiserv•New York, NY

8d•Onsite

About The Position

This is a hands-on leadership role where you will lead manual underwriting for Fiserv's small business lending portfolio. You will own day-to-day underwriting execution and credit decision quality for an existing team, scale the team as volume grows, and partner with decision science and product teams to automate more decisions over time. You will be responsible for bringing forward new data sources and new approaches to improve the credit decisioning framework. You will be accountable for both the credit outcome and for the throughput, turnaround time, and consistency of the decisions your team makes.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in finance, accounting, economics, or a related field.
10 years of experience in commercial or small business credit, with a track record of underwriting large-dollar commercial exposures and making the final call on them.
Strong financial statement analysis skills — you can read a business’s financials, bank statements, and cash flow and form an independent view of repayment capacity and risk.
5 years managing people, including direct leadership of teams of 5–10 or more; demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain underwriting talent.
Operations management depth: experience running a production credit environment with SLAs, capacity constraints, and volume growth — and improving it measurably.
Comfort with data. You use analytics to find where the process is leaking, and you can hold your own in a conversation with modelers and data scientists.
Sound judgment under ambiguity, and the credibility to defend a credit decision to senior stakeholders.
Must currently possess valid and unrestricted U.S. work authorization to be considered for this role. Individuals with temporary visas including, but not limited to, F-1 (OPT, CPT, STEM), H-1B, H-2, or TN, or any candidate requiring sponsorship, now or in the future, will not be considered for this role.

Nice To Haves

Genuine interest in how AI and agentic tooling can be applied to commercial underwriting — document extraction, spreading, narrative analysis, exception handling — and a point of view on where it works and where a human still needs to decide.
Experience with merchant cash advance, working capital, equipment finance, or embedded lending products.
Exposure to alternative data in credit decisioning (payment processing data, bank transaction data, bureau attributes).
Experience partnering with model development or decision science teams on automation of a manual process.

Responsibilities

Own manual underwriting execution end to end: queue management, decision quality, turnaround time, and adherence to credit policy.
Personally adjudicate and review the largest and most complex commercial exposures, including escalations and exceptions.
Lead, coach, and grow a team of 8–10 underwriters across multiple locations; build the hiring, training, calibration, and QA structures that keep decisions consistent as the team scales.
Define and manage the operating metrics for the function — capacity models, productivity, decision accuracy, override and exception rates — and act on what they show.
Partner with decision science and credit policy to codify underwriter judgment into scorecards, rules, and automated decisioning; identify which decisions should stay manual and which should not.
Contribute to credit policy development: document tiering, exception frameworks, and the thresholds that route a file to manual review.
Work with product, engineering, and operations partners to improve the underwriting workflow and the tooling underwriters rely on.
Represent underwriting in portfolio, loss, and audit reviews with credible, data-backed analysis.

Benefits

Fuel Your Life wellness program with activities and rewards to support total well-being
Paid statutory holidays, Recharge & Refuel vacation (years-of-service tiers), and a Paid Sick Time program
No-cost, confidential support through the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for you and household members
Recognition through Living Proof, with points redeemable for merchandise and gift cards
Eight Employee Resource Groups to build connection and inclusion
RRSP with 100% company match up to 5%, a Non-Registered Savings Plan (NREG), and an Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
Comprehensive extended health care and vision benefits, plus dental coverage
Company-paid Basic Life and AD&D, with optional life and AD&D coverage available
Company-paid Short-Term Disability and Long-Term Disability income protection
Emergency medical coverage for out-of-province/out-of-country travel via extended health benefits