Earnest LLC – Oakland, CA

Title: Director, Credit Risk

Duties:

• The Director, Credit Risk at Earnest LLC in Oakland, CA will lead the development, deployment, testing, monitoring, and optimization of the credit strategies of the lending products offered by Earnest LLC, including Personal Loan, or Student Loan Refinance, or Private Student Loans.

• Analyze the industry's lending products, our applications and portfolio to drive the best return for the product, and serve on the Credit Team, whose primary mission is to grow the lending revenue responsibly to maximize profit within the company’s risk appetite.

• Design data-based credit strategies for pre-screening, underwriting, risk tiering, loan amount assignment, and verifications to drive credit optimization.

• Partner with the Data Science team to design new machine learning risk models.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to accurately deploy new strategies, and evaluate new data sources and models to improve the strategy risk separation.

• Lead the process for establishing target metrics and expectations, and constantly monitor and evaluate the strategies and portfolio performance.

• Identify gaps and issues, and solve business problems.

• Lead the team to conduct monitoring analyses and identify opportunities for continuous enhancement and optimization.

• Continuously improve existing processes and funnel conversions; and communicate results, insights, and recommendations to senior leadership and business partners.

• Lead, support, and develop team members.

• Serve as a key participant in risk team hiring.

• Mentor other analysts on risk analytics; and manage multiple projects with cross-functional stakeholders simultaneously set priorities, and meet deadlines.

• Work with cross-function teams to deliver successful business results.

• Deliver insights into product design and functionality to align product construction with Earnest’s risk tolerance.

• Work cross-functionally with the Product and Analytics squads to build experiments to drive risk-adjusted returns.

• Coordinate with the Capital Markets, Analytics, and FP&A teams to ensure that expected portfolio performance is accurately reflected.

• Develop diligence materials to support the execution of business transactions and provide analysis results to management and external ratings agencies.

• Telecommuting permitted up to five days per week, but must live in the Oakland, California area.  Salary: $298,022/year.

Position is 100% remote.

Requirements:

• Master’s degree in Finance, Mathematics, or a closely related field

• 7 years of experience as a risk manager or related occupation in the consumer lending industry;

• Including 7 years of experience with each of the following:

• developing data-driven credit strategies for lending products, including pre-screening, underwriting, risk tiering, loan amount assignment, and verifications;

• modeling techniques, including decision trees, logistic regression, gradient boosting models and other machine learning models;

• analyzing customer performance data, bureau attributes, and other third-party variables to solve business problems

• building underwriting risk scores;

• cash flow financial modeling and lending products’ P&L evaluation;

• loss forecast methodology and portfolio management;

• Excel, SQL, and Python;

• A/B testing;

• business intelligence tools, including Looker or Tableau.

This notice is subject to Earnest LLC's employee referral program.

Interested candidates can apply online at www.earnest.com/careers [earnest.com] or send a resume to
directrecruiting@earnest.com and reference job code 064.

The Senior Fraud Strategy Analyst will report to Senior Manager, Fraud Strategy.

You will help build and scale fraud strategy for a growing lending business—owning execution today while shaping the long-term approach as we scale.

What You’ll Do

• Reduce fraud loss while supporting growth by building and optimizing fraud rules and strategies
• Own fraud monitoring and analysis, identifying risks across channels, segments, and customer cohorts
• Turn data into action by investigating trends, surfacing insights, and driving decisions
• Scale fraud operations by creating repeatable frameworks and improving coverage as volume grows
• Design and evaluate experiments to balance fraud risk, approval rates, and customer experience
• Partner cross-functionally to implement fraud controls across product, risk, and engineering
• Support new products and channels by ensuring fraud risk is managed from day one

About You

• 4+ years in fraud, risk, or analytics in fintech, lending, or financial services
• Strong SQL skills and comfort working hands-on with data
• Familiarity with fraud types (synthetic ID, ATO, first-party fraud)
• Experience with fraud strategy, monitoring, or detection (not just operations)
• Ability to connect analysis to business outcomes (loss, conversion, approvals)
• Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
• Clear communicator with a strong sense of ownership and initiative

Even Better

• Experience in unsecured lending (personal loans, fintech)
• Experience with experimentation or modeling (Python/R)
• Background in 0→1 or scaling teams

Where:

• This role will be based in the US.

Compensation: 

A little about our pay philosophy: We take pride in compensating our employees fairly and equitably. We are showcasing a range of your potential base salary based on the roles location. The successful candidate’s starting pay will also be determined based on job-related qualifications, internal compensation, candidate location and budget. This range may be modified in the future.

Salary Range: $124,000 - $155,000 USD. Employees are also eligible for an annual performance-based bonus and equity.

#LI-GA1

The Sr Model Risk Manager will report to the Head of Credit Risk. 

As the Sr Model Risk Manager, you will:

• Own and evolve Earnest’s Model Risk Management framework, ensuring our credit, loss forecasting, fraud, marketing, and finance models are rigorous, transparent, and built to scale responsibly.
• Lead independent end-to-end model validations — from conceptual soundness and data quality to performance monitoring and implementation review — delivering thoughtful, constructive challenge to modeling teams.
• Partner closely with Data Science and Risk leaders early in the model design process to strengthen assumptions, improve methodology, and elevate modeling standards across the company.
• Oversee model performance monitoring and proactively identify emerging risks, performance drift, or control gaps — ensuring timely, practical remediation.
• Deliver clear, decision-ready validation reports and communicate technical findings in a way that drives strong business outcomes and sound risk decisions.
• Serve as a trusted advisor on model governance, helping Earnest move fast while maintaining the discipline and controls required of a best-in-class lending platform.

About You: 

• You hold a Master’s degree in a quantitative field (Statistics, Economics, Mathematics, Financial Engineering, or similar) with 7+ years of experience in model development, validation, or model risk management in financial services (or a Bachelor’s degree with 10+ years of relevant experience).
• You’ve worked in consumer or small business lending — ideally in a fintech or innovative banking environment — and understand the models that power modern credit decisioning.
• You have hands-on experience with statistical and machine learning models and are comfortable diving into Python code and large datasets using SQL to independently assess model performance.
• You understand regulatory model risk expectations and know how to apply them pragmatically in a high-growth environment.
• You bring strong judgment, intellectual independence, and the confidence to challenge assumptions while building productive cross-functional partnerships.
• You can translate complex modeling concepts into clear, actionable insights for senior stakeholders.

Even Better:

• Experience in loss forecasting models, preferably with hands-on exposure to CECL frameworks, including model development, validation, or governance.
• Experience with personal loans or student lending products.
• Experience interacting with auditors or regulators in model risk or credit oversight contexts.
• Experience reviewing third-party or vendor models.
• Experience building or maturing a model governance framework at a scaling fintech company.

Where:

• This role will be based in the US.

Compensation: 

A little about our pay philosophy: We take pride in compensating our employees fairly and equitably. We are showcasing a range of your potential base salary based on the roles location. The successful candidate’s starting pay will also be determined based on job-related qualifications, internal compensation, candidate location and budget. This range may be modified in the future.

Salary Range: $190,000 - $237,000 USD. Employees are also eligible for an annual performance-based bonus and equity.

#LI-KB

The Senior Credit Strategy Analyst will report to Senior Credit Risk Manager, Personal Loans. 

As the Senior Credit Strategy Analyst, you will:

• Own end-to-end implementation of credit and fraud policies for all product lines within Earnest decisioning platform, including testing, deployment, and validation to ensure accuracy and alignment with policy intent
• Develop and optimize credit underwriting and fraud prevention strategies for personal loans, balancing growth, risk, and customer experience objectives
• Analyze portfolio performance, approval funnels, and fraud trends to identify opportunities for strategy enhancements and loss mitigation
• Design, test, and implement decision rules, segmentation strategies, and policy changes using data-driven experimentation frameworks
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Data Science, Compliance, and Operations to ensure strategies are effectively deployed and monitored
• Build dashboards, reporting, and monitoring frameworks to track credit and fraud KPIs, including approval rates, losses, and fraud rates
• Support model and strategy governance through documentation, controls, and performance reviews

About You: 

• 3+ years of experience in risk management within consumer finance, banking, or lending
• 1+ years of experience implementing credit strategies within a loan decisioning platform (e.g., Alloy or similar systems)
• Experience working with credit bureau data (e.g., Experian, TransUnion, Equifax) and alternative data sources
• Strong knowledge of regulations, standards, and guidelines governing consumer lending
• Proficiency in SQL and Python for data analysis and strategy development
• Ability to independently analyze data, identify trends and anomalies, and translate insights into actionable recommendations
• Experience working with decisioning platforms to implement and maintain credit and fraud strategies, including translating policy into production-ready rules and logic

Even Better:

• 1+ year of experience working with consumer fraud tools and monitoring fraud trends
• Experience with BI and visualization tools such as Looker or Tableau
• Familiarity with internal control requirements and risk governance frameworks
• Experience validating data integrity and troubleshooting discrepancies across systems and pipelines
• Experience executing small- to mid-sized cross-functional initiatives with limited oversight
• Strong understanding of data structures and ability to quickly learn new databases and tools
• Demonstrated focus on efficiency improvements, automation, and process optimization

Where:

• This role will be based in the US.

Compensation: 

A little about our pay philosophy: We take pride in compensating our employees fairly and equitably. We are showcasing a range of your potential base salary based on the roles location. The successful candidate’s starting pay will also be determined based on job-related qualifications, internal compensation, candidate location and budget. This range may be modified in the future.

Salary Range: $124,000 - $155,000 USD. Employees are also eligible for an annual performance-based bonus and equity.

#LI-KB