Head of Collections, Director/VP

ClarityPay•New York, NY

2d•Onsite

About The Position

ClarityPay is seeking a Head of Collections to lead the transformation of our collections and recovery performance functions. This is a high-impact leadership role responsible for defining the strategic roadmap for collections, scaling our operational capabilities, and pioneering the industry’s shift toward AI-assisted, digital-first recovery models. You will not just manage a department; you will design a high-frequency, data-driven system underpinned by bank-grade governance. Reporting directly to the COO, you will sit at the intersection of Finance, Risk, Legal, and Engineering. You will lead a multi-disciplinary effort to maximize net recoveries, shape our regulatory policies, and build a first-class collections organization that treats data as its primary asset.

Requirements

Experience: 10+ years in credit, collections, or risk management within a regulated FinTech or banking environment, with a proven track record of improving recovery performance at scale.
Regulatory Fluency: Deep, practical expertise in consumer finance regulations. You have successfully navigated bank-grade audits and know how to draft policies that satisfy both regulators and ambitious data scientists.
Technical Acumen: While you are a business leader, you are finance and data native. You understand core concepts central to collections such as lifetime value, connection between operational metrics and financial outcomes, causal effects, and orthogonality of unit metric change from distributional impact
Change Agent: You have successfully led digital transformation efforts, moving legacy operations into automated, digital-first environments while bringing Legal and Operations along for the journey.
Strategic Mindset: You move naturally between high-level policy definition and tactical execution, capable of designing the long-term recovery curve while optimizing a specific operational workflow.

Responsibilities

Governance & Policy Ownership: Establish and own a heightened governance structure that delivers bank-grade compliance results. You will author the internal policies and frameworks, including operating procedures and training documents, that dictate our collections practices, ensuring strict adherence to federal and state regulations (FDCPA, FCRA, UDAAP).
Strategic Legal Collaboration: Partner seamlessly with Legal and Compliance to translate rigid regulations into operational flexibility. You will negotiate the "guardrails" that allow our ML and operational teams to test, optimize, and safely execute dynamic outreach strategies without introducing regulatory risk.
Process & Planning Optimization: Re-architect our planning, operational, and management processes. You will build the resilient, auditable workflows necessary to support a continuous-learning data environment, ensuring that every decision is traceable and defensible.
AI & Agentic Migration: Lead the migration from traditional agent-led collections toward AI agent-assisted interfaces. You will shape the logic, persona, and compliance boundaries of our automated agents to drive digital engagement and surgical, automated nudges.
Performance Accountability: Own the "Net Recovery Rate" KPI. You will be responsible for defining, measuring, and reporting on the instrumentation of all management levers and their causal effects on repayment behavior, communicating these metrics to the executive team and external capital partners.
Engineering Partnership: Act as the primary business owner for the Decision Science and ML Engineering teams. You will translate collections goals into technical requirements for causal ML frameworks to optimize timing, channel, and messaging (e.g., "Stick vs. Carrot") for every customer interaction.