Director, Small Business Credit Underwriting

Fiserv • Berkeley Heights, NJ

1d • $113,000 - $184,800 • 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 introducing new data sources and approaches to enhance the credit decisioning framework. Your accountability will extend to both credit outcomes and the throughput, turnaround time, and consistency of the decisions made by your team.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in finance, accounting, economics, or a related field.
• 10 years of experience in commercial or small business credit, with a proven track record of underwriting and making final decisions on large-dollar commercial exposures.
• Strong financial statement analysis skills, including the ability to interpret business financials, bank statements, and cash flow to form an independent view of repayment capacity and risk.
• 5 years of people management experience, including direct leadership of teams of 5-10 or more, with a demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain underwriting talent.
• Operations management depth, including experience running a production credit environment with SLAs, capacity constraints, and volume growth, and measurably improving it.
• Comfort with data and analytics to identify process inefficiencies and engage in discussions with modelers and data scientists.
• Sound judgment under ambiguity and the ability to defend credit decisions to senior stakeholders.
• Must currently possess valid and unrestricted U.S. work authorization. Individuals requiring sponsorship now or in the future will not be considered.

Nice To Haves

• Genuine interest in applying AI and agentic tooling to commercial underwriting (e.g., document extraction, spreading, narrative analysis, exception handling) and a point of view on where human decision-making is still necessary.
• Experience with merchant cash advance, working capital, equipment finance, or embedded lending products.
• Exposure to alternative data in credit decisioning (e.g., payment processing data, bank transaction data, bureau attributes).
• Experience partnering with model development or decision science teams on the automation of manual processes.

Responsibilities

• Own manual underwriting execution end to end, including 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, building hiring, training, calibration, and QA structures to ensure consistent decisions as the team scales.
• Define and manage operating metrics for the function, such as capacity models, productivity, decision accuracy, and override/exception rates, and take action based on these metrics.
• Partner with decision science and credit policy teams to codify underwriter judgment into scorecards, rules, and automated decisioning, identifying which decisions should remain manual.
• Contribute to credit policy development by documenting tiering, exception frameworks, and thresholds for manual review.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and operations partners to improve the underwriting workflow and the tools used by underwriters.
• Represent underwriting in portfolio, loss, and audit reviews with credible, data-backed analysis.

Benefits

• Fuel Your Life wellness program with activities and rewards
• Paid statutory holidays
• Recharge & Refuel vacation (with years-of-service tiers)
• 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
• RRSP with 100% company match up to 5%
• Non-Registered Savings Plan (NREG)
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Comprehensive extended health care and vision benefits
• Dental coverage
• Company-paid Basic Life and AD&D
• Optional life and AD&D coverage
• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director