Senior Manager, Whole Loan Trading & First-Line Model Governance

The Team

Upstart’s Secured Lending organization is building the first-line risk and control infrastructure that will support the next stage of growth across home equity line of credit, auto direct, and auto indirect dealer products. The team helps ensure secured lending products operate with clear governance, durable controls, high-quality execution, and readiness for bank partner and regulatory review.

Whole Loan Trading & First-Line Model Governance is responsible for monitoring portfolio-wide trends across loan salability, asset quality, and model performance. This function looks across the portfolio over time — tracking performance against investor and bank partner thresholds, interpreting model execution patterns, identifying systemic risk, and escalating findings before they become repurchase events, partner concerns, or examination issues.

As the Senior Manager, Whole Loan Trading & First-Line Model Governance at Upstart, you will own this function end-to-end, reporting directly to the Head of Secured Lending. You will lead a small team of analysts and partner closely with Credit Risk, Capital Markets, Model Risk Management, Product, Engineering, Compliance, Legal, Operations, and bank partners to establish the methodology, monitoring cadence, governance materials, and reporting routines that keep Upstart’s secured lending portfolio within risk appetite and exam-ready.

How you'll make an impact

• Lead the secured lending asset quality and loan salability function across home equity line of credit, auto direct, and auto indirect dealer channels, setting the review methodology, operating cadence, reporting standards, and escalation routines for a small team of asset quality analysts.
• Monitor portfolio-level salability risk across secured lending channels — tracking eligibility adherence trends, defect patterns, collateral documentation quality, and exception concentrations; escalate repurchase and put-back risk to Capital Markets and bank partners before they affect loan sale execution or partner commitments.
• Monitor asset quality and portfolio performance indicators tied to salability, including early payment defaults, delinquency, loss severity, prepayment, non-performing loan trends, exception patterns, and threshold breaches.
• Evaluate origination and channel quality across secured lending programs, including collateral documentation completeness, lien perfection, override trends, pricing consistency, dealer or partner performance, concentration risk, and potential fair lending exposure.
• Own first-line model implementation and performance oversight for secured lending models, including production model monitoring, threshold tracking, version control, use-case boundaries, model inventory updates, change impact assessment, and escalation of performance degradation or out-of-bounds behavior.
• Translate loan review findings, portfolio trends, and model performance signals into action by identifying root causes, defining remediation plans, tracking issue closure, and escalating risks before they affect loan sale execution, partner commitments, or regulatory readiness..

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in business-line credit risk, loan quality, asset-backed or secured lending operations, or first-line model governance supporting secured or asset-backed consumer lending products.
• Experience with loan-level quality review, loan salability oversight, Capital Markets or investor delivery, repurchase or put-back risk, bank partner audits, collateral documentation review, or pre-sale quality control in a regulated lending environment.
• Experience monitoring portfolio performance and asset quality indicators across multiple origination channels, including early payment default, delinquency, prepayment, loss severity, non-performing loan trends, credit policy exceptions, threshold breaches, or channel-level pricing and fair lending patterns.
• Experience with first-line model oversight, production model monitoring, model implementation governance, model inventory documentation, or model performance escalation processes.
• Experience partnering with Capital Markets, investors, bank partners, or funding teams to evaluate loan eligibility, resolve delivery exceptions, interpret investor requirements, and mitigate repurchase, put-back, or make-whole exposure.
• Experience leading analysts, managing a review function, or owning cross-functional loan salability, asset quality, credit, or first-line model governance programs.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with auto indirect or dealer channel lending dynamics, including pricing discretion, dealer markup, and fair lending considerations relevant to indirect origination channels; ability to partner with fair lending oversight functions to interpret and escalate channel-level findings.
• Knowledge of secured lending and secondary-market quality expectations, including exposure to first mortgage or asset-backed lending frameworks such as investor eligibility standards, collateral documentation, lien perfection, representations and warranties, defect remediation, trailing performance thresholds, and repurchase or make-whole risk.
• Knowledge of consumer lending and fair lending requirements relevant to secured products, including Equal Credit Opportunity Act/Regulation B, Unfair, Deceptive, or Abusive Acts or Practices, Fair Credit Reporting Act, TILA/Regulation Z, dealer markup oversight, adverse action, or credit decisioning controls.
• Ability to evaluate production model execution, validation outputs, fair lending review outputs, underwriting accuracy, pricing consistency, and performance trends against approved thresholds.
• Skilled in producing exam-ready policy documents, governance materials, issue tracking, executive summaries, and bank partner reporting.
• Risk or compliance certification, such as Certified Regulatory Compliance Manager, Financial Risk Manager, or equivalent credential.

Position location This role is available in the following locations: Remote 

Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are encouraged to to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions’ cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time.

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