SVP, Head of Intelligence

Cross River•Fort Lee, NJ

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Cross River is building the financial infrastructure of the Intelligence Age - the regulated backbone on which AI-era finance runs. The Intelligence organization is where that ambition becomes operational: the models, platforms, and data products that power credit, compliance, payments, and strategic decision-making across the bank. We are hiring an SVP, Head of Intelligence to own this organization end to end. This is not a caretaker role. You will inherit a function mid-transformation - a Modeling Organization being rebuilt around automation, a data infrastructure team being re-platformed, and a new class of intelligence products being stood up from redeployed talent - and you will own the whole build chain. This is a Commercial Product Role – you need to of course be an Engineering Leader but Commercial Strategist First. You report directly to the EVP & Chief AI Officer.

Requirements

12+ years across data/ML platform engineering and quantitative or decision-science organizations (not engineering only).
5+ years leading multi-team engineering orgs (30+ people) through platform transitions.
High Pressure Experience - Trading desks, Quant shops, Algorithmic houses is a HARD requirement.
A P&L-first architect. Every product in this organization follows the same cycle: ideate → test → measure → deploy → measure → tweak → measure → scale → measure. Architecture serves that loop - commercial outcomes are the design input, not a downstream discovery.
Proven ownership of an ML/AI platform in production at scale - model lifecycle, feature/data infrastructure, serving, observability - ideally in a regulated environment (banking, payments, lending, insurance).
AI Native and Bias for automation - small senior teams over headcount; measure yourself on throughput per engineer.
Demonstrated ability to lead senior, technically formidable direct reports - including leaders who previously ran their own organizations - and make them more effective.
Fluency in model governance realities: SR 11-7, first-line/second-line separation, and how to build controls into systems rather than committees.
Product instinct: have turned internal data capabilities into products with customers, roadmaps, and adoption metrics, not just dashboards.
Comfort operating across organizational seams: negotiating SLAs with peer organizations, consuming shared platforms, and escalating on contract rather than on relationship.

Nice To Haves

Commercial Strategist First.

Responsibilities

Own CRB Intelligence, the bank's intelligence platform - the models, tooling, and serving layer purpose-built for the Intelligence organization, built vertically on top of the bank's horizontal enterprise AI platform.
Own the architecture and engineering of the data foundation Intelligence runs on, including a senior architecture team reporting to you.
Define the roadmap, ship the products, and prove the P&L logic for a new product line turning the bank's data exhaust into decision products for the business: credit intelligence, counterparty intelligence, market and network analytics.
Oversee the bank's model development organization - credit and compliance modeling.
Ensure CRB Intelligence is in production, with the Model development lifecycle running on it – automated and observable.
Establish build/run separation: ensure nothing transfers to operations without runbooks, SLOs, and alerting; nothing comes back over the wall.
Ship at least three Intelligence Products with named internal customers and measurable decision impact within the first 9 months.
Ensure the Model Factory operates at materially higher throughput with a smaller, more senior team.
Ensure the seam with the enterprise AI platform is clean: consume horizontal, build vertical, and maintain one AI platform strategy at the bank.
Lead senior, technically formidable direct reports, including leaders who previously ran their own organizations, and make them more effective.
Operate across organizational seams: negotiate SLAs with peer organizations, consume shared platforms, and escalate on contract rather than on relationship.