Engagement Manager – Credit Strategy

Inizio Partners; San Diego (TX); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

A financial services firm is seeking an Engagement Manager for Credit Strategy in San Diego. In this hybrid role, you will design credit strategies for small-business lending, optimizing financial performance and managing credit risks. You will work closely with Product, Engineering, and Data Science teams, developing innovative policies and frameworks to enhance approval rates while managing risk exposure. The ideal candidate has over 7 years of relevant experience, strong proficiency in SQL and Python, and advanced degrees in data science or related fields.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in credit strategies for small business lending.
• Experience in ML Ops and model deployment is highly preferred.
• Ability to lead cross-functional initiatives and coordinate offshore teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy innovative approval strategies maximizing application rates.
• Develop underwriting policies defining acceptance criteria.
• Collaborate with various teams to refine credit strategies.

Skills

Credit strategy design

SQL proficiency

Python proficiency

Communication skills

Cross-functional leadership

Education

Master's degree in Data Science or related quantitative field

Bachelor's degree in a related quantitative field

Job description

Overview

• Role: Engagement Manager – Credit Strategy
• Location: San Diego, CA (Hybrid - min 3 days/week in office)

As the Engagement Manager – Credit Strategy, you will design, deploy, and optimize end-to-end credit strategies that balance growth, profitability, and credit risk for a small-business lending portfolio. You will develop policy frameworks for approvals, segmentation, limits, and pricing; embed forward-looking risk signals; and build monitoring to keep portfolio performance within loss tolerances. You will partner with client and internal leaders across Risk, Product, Engineering, and Underwriting to operationalize decisioning, enable rapid experimentation, and create resilient portfolios that are attractive to debt investors on a risk-adjusted basis.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy innovative approval, qualification, and segmentation strategies that maximize application approval rates while achieving credit loss targets
• Develop and maintain underwriting policies that define minimum acceptance criteria and policy declines for segments outside client\'s risk appetite
• Create statistically grounded credit limit assignment frameworks that optimize lifetime customer value while managing downside risk
• Design pricing and interest rate strategies, including testing frameworks, to ensure adequate loss coverage, strong borrower selection, and high customer take-up rates
• Optimize data collection strategies by balancing the information value of data against customer friction and operational cost
• Partner closely with the manual underwriting team to build a hybrid risk framework that integrates analytical strategies with expert manual review, ensuring consistent execution and continuous feedback loops. This would require innovative credit strategy tooling to create differentiated credit pathways for applications based on their profile, loan amount exposure and complexity of underwriting required
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Data Science teams to design and deploy scalable infrastructure that enables rapid iteration and refinement of credit strategies
• Establish robust portfolio monitoring and reporting processes to track approval rates, credit performance, and risk metrics against expectations
• Apply a thoughtful, forward-looking approach to portfolio construction to ensure assets are resilient across economic cycles and attractive to debt investors on a risk-adjusted basis
• Incorporate macroeconomic trends and forward-looking risk signals into credit strategy to ensure ongoing relevance in evolving market conditions

Qualifications

• 7+ years of hands-on experience designing, calibrating, and managing credit strategies for cash advance / short-duration small business credit products; prior MCA credit strategy experience
• Strong experience overseeing model deployment, execution, and monitoring within a production environment; ML Ops experience is highly preferred
• Master's degree in Data Science, Statistics, Economics, Finance, or a related quantitative discipline
• Strong SQL and Python proficiency; ability to work with large datasets and build reproducible analytical workflows.
• Excellent communication, presentation, and story-building skills in a consulting/client-facing setup.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional initiatives end-to-end and coordinate with offshore delivery teams.
• Bachelor's degree in a related quantitative field such as Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Economics, Finance, or Engineering required.
• Master's degree in Data Science, Statistics, Economics, Finance, or a related quantitative discipline is a plus