Product Owner

Harrington Starr; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 105,000; Full time

Job summary

Harrington Starr is seeking a Product Owner for Credit & Specialist Lending in fintech. The role sits between clients, commercial leadership and an offshore development team to define the product road ahead.

You will own workflows around commercial mortgage origination and real estate finance drawdown, translating underwriting processes into actionable user stories and requirements.

Qualifications

• Deep knowledge of specialist/commercial lending workflows.
• Experience translating underwriting processes into product requirements.
• Ability to validate workflows with customers and translate to development needs.

Responsibilities

• Own product thinking around commercial mortgage origination and real estate finance drawdown.
• Translate underwriting steps into user stories and requirements.
• Collaborate with customers, leadership and offshore development to shape next features.

Skills

Specialist lending

Credit analysis

Underwriting

User stories

Job description

Product Owner – Credit & Specialist Lending (Fintech)

£500/day - Inside IR35 - 3-month initial contract. Options to extend or convert to Perm

London / Hybrid & Remote Working (Can be 5 days remote with an option to come to London for client work)

A technology consultancy is building a new agentic lending platform for specialist lenders, designed to automate document ingestion and credit decisioning across highly manual lending workflows. The initial product is already being built by a 15-person engineering team, with commercial mortgage origination and real estate finance drawdowns forming the first two workflows.

They now need someone who genuinely understands how specialist lending works in practice. Someone who knows what happens from broker submission through underwriting and credit approval, but who can translate that knowledge into a technology product.

This is not a Project Manager position. It is about bringing lending expertise into the product team, answering the questions engineers cannot answer themselves and helping determine what should be built next.

Your role

This is a high-impact Product Owner contract sitting between customers, commercial leadership and an offshore development team.

You’ll:

• Own the product thinking around commercial mortgage origination and real estate finance drawdown workflows.
• Translate real-world underwriting processes into user stories, product requirements and workflow decisions.
• Understand the documents, checks, exceptions and approvals required to move a lending application towards a credit decision.
• Work directly with customers and prospects to validate workflows and identify genuine operational pain points.
• Challenge requirements and determine whether proposed features solve a real lending problem.
• Identify additional use cases and help shape what the platform should build next.
• Work across product, commercial and engineering teams to turn lending expertise into a scalable proposition.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong experience within specialist/commercial lending, ideally commercial mortgages or real estate finance.
• A background as an Underwriter, Credit Analyst or lending SME who has subsequently moved towards product, technology or process improvement.
• Deep understanding of lending origination, including broker submissions, borrower due diligence, financial assessment, property documentation and credit approval.
• Ability to understand where manual document review, exceptions and bottlenecks occur and where technology can automate them.
• Product instincts: able to turn domain expertise into workflows, user stories and product decisions.
• Experience building or shaping 0→1 products, propositions or technology-enabled lending processes.
• Confidence working directly with senior stakeholders, customers and development teams.

Why This Role

• Real ownership: become the lending domain authority influencing how the product develops.
• Build, don't just deliver: shape technology addressing genuinely manual areas of specialist lending.
• Customer exposure: work directly with lenders and use market feedback to influence the roadmap.
• Opportunity beyond the MVP: the business already has a backlog of around 25 potential use cases to explore following the initial release.
• London office with remote working offered.