Senior Product Manager - Credit Decisioning Platform

Koalafi•Arlington, VA

3h•Onsite

About The Position

At Koalafi, we believe in a world where no one has to put an important purchase on hold. That’s why we’re making it easier for more people to pay for big purchases over time. Retailers across the country rely on us to offer flexible lease-to-own financing to their non-prime consumers, while increasing sales and strengthening customer loyalty. Their 2M+ customers love us because we provide a flexible way for them to make payments and give them an opportunity to improve their credit. Our 200+ Koalafi teammates enjoy inspiring and challenging work that accelerates their careers. Interested in learning more about how we’re transforming the financing experience and joining our team? We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager to help own and evolve Koalafi’s Credit Decisioning Platform: the core capabilities that power underwriting, eligibility, pricing, and risk management across our financing products. This platform sits at the intersection of product, engineering, data and risk—and is foundational to Koalafi’s growth, profitability, and customer experience. You’ll be the embedded, day-to-day Product Manager for the Credit Decisioning engineering team, owning the roadmap, delivery, and performance of the platform. The platform is mid-transformation—we’re rebuilding core infrastructure to be faster, more configurable, and ready to scale, unlocking key company initiatives along the way. This role is ideal for a systems-minded product manager who thrives when solving hard product and systems problems, where decision logic, data, models, and workflows must work together at scale. You have enough technical fluency to partner closely with engineers, data scientists, and cross-functional stakeholders, and know how to ask strong questions and translate business and credit risk strategy into clear platform capabilities. You’ll align cross-functional leaders on a strategy and roadmap to advance the decisioning platform as an engine for growth and profitability—accelerating new products and partners without compromising risk discipline.

Requirements

5+ years of product management experience with a focus on building and shipping technical, data-driven platforms
Proven ability to operate in technically sophisticated domains, with the fluency to engage deeply with engineers, data scientists, and analysts
Strong systems thinker who can translate business needs into platform capabilities that scale across products, strategies, and use cases
Experience using data, experimentation, and metrics to inform prioritization and evaluate success of platform investments
Demonstrated judgment in balancing short-term business needs with long-term platform health and scalability
Ability to lead and influence cross-functional teams towards a common goal
Excellent communicator who brings clarity and builds alignment across diverse stakeholders; capable of communicating at multiple altitudes—from executive strategy discussions to in-the-weeds technical conversations
Comfortable operating in ambiguous environments where decisions matter, and able to create clarity, structure and momentum over time
Location Requirement: This position requires regular in-person attendance at one of our two office locations (Richmond, VA or Arlington, VA). Candidates must already be located within a commutable distance to either location, as relocation assistance is not available at this time.

Nice To Haves

Experience in fintech, lending, credit risk, fraud risk, or decisioning platforms/systems
Familiarity with the machine learning model lifecycle, including development, deployment, monitoring, and iteration in production systems
Exposure to regulatory, compliance, or risk management frameworks in financial services

Responsibilities

Own and drive the roadmap for Koalafi’s Credit Decisioning Platform
Lead prioritization and facilitate thoughtful tradeoffs with key stakeholders balancing business impact, risk outcomes, and platform health
Align Engineering, Risk, Data Science, and cross-functional stakeholders on what matters most and why
Lead ongoing discovery with stakeholders to surface needs and gaps, then translate both business strategy and individual use cases into cohesive, reusable platform capabilities
Lead delivery as the embedded product manager for the Credit Decisioning engineering team
Partner continuously with engineering to define the what and the why, while empowering the team to determine the how
Maintain a prioritized backlog with crisp epics and stories, clear acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes
Lead the team’s delivery cadence, participating in agile ceremonies to ship reliably and improve iteration speed
Define success metrics and measurement plans, ensure releases are instrumented and outcomes are reviewed post-launch
Shape the platform to enable faster risk strategy iteration, seamless multi-merchant journeys, and safe scaling
Empower the Risk team to iterate on decisioning logic quickly and safely through configurable, self-serve platform capabilities
Build the decisioning platform primitives that unlock seamless, multi-merchant financing journeys for consumers
Drive operational excellence by treating performance, reliability, observability, auditability, and decision explainability as foundational requirements