Head of Underwriting

Pylon

$160K — $200K *
Finance & Insurance
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Significant mortgage underwriting and leadership experience required.
  • Preference for candidates with scaled wholesale lending experience.
  • Must have experience managing hundreds to thousands of loans monthly.
  • Excellent credit judgment with in-depth knowledge of underwriting guidelines and exceptions.
  • Ability to make domain expertise explicit and systematic for technology integration.
  • Strong focus on process quality and operational excellence.
  • Comfortable collaborating with technical teams in a dynamic setting.

Responsibilities

  • Own underwriting domain expertise, quality, and exception management.
  • Review and establish protocols for complex underwriting scenarios.
  • Translate underwriting guidelines into actionable requirements for Product and Engineering teams.
  • Identify and streamline recurring manual processes for automation.
  • Establish quality assurance and monitoring for automated decisions.
  • Collaborate with various departments: Processing, Compliance, Capital Markets, Account Management, Product, and Engineering.
  • Develop metrics related to decision coverage, review rates, and process efficiency.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to shape the future of automated mortgage underwriting.
  • Collaborative environment working with cross-functional teams.
  • Focus on professional growth and expanding product capabilities.
  • Involvement in decision-making for effective underwriting automation.
Full Job Description
Role Overview

Pylon is building software-driven, real-time mortgage underwriting. Our Decisioning engine evaluates borrower data and underwriting guidelines to automate credit decisions that traditionally move through manual underwriting queues.

As Head of Underwriting, you will bring the judgment of a world-class underwriting organization into that system. This is not a mandate to build a large conventional underwriting department. You will own the domain expertise, controls, exceptions, quality, and feedback loops that let Pylon safely automate more underwriting over time.

Responsibilities
  • Own underwriting domain expertise, quality, policy interpretation, and exception handling.
  • Review complex or unsupported scenarios and define how they should be handled going forward.
  • Translate underwriting guidelines and expert judgment into requirements Product and Engineering can encode into Pylon's Decisioning platform.
  • Identify recurring conditions, reviews, and escalations that should be automated or eliminated.
  • Establish QA, monitoring, override, and escalation mechanisms for automated decisions.
  • Partner closely with Processing, Compliance, Capital Markets, Account Management, Product, and Engineering.
  • Build metrics around automated decision coverage, manual-review rate, decision time, conditions, exceptions, overrides, and defects.
  • Help expand product and guideline coverage without sacrificing credit quality.


Qualifications
  • Significant mortgage underwriting and underwriting-leadership experience.
  • Strong preference for scaled wholesale lending experience.
  • Experience operating at hundreds or thousands of loans per month.
  • Excellent credit judgment and deep knowledge of underwriting guidelines and exceptions.
  • Ability to make implicit domain expertise explicit and systematic.
  • Strong process and quality orientation.
  • Comfortable working directly with technical teams in a rapidly evolving environment.


What success looks like

A growing percentage of Pylon loans receive fast, consistent decisions without routine manual underwriting. Human experts concentrate on genuinely difficult scenarios, automated decisions remain high quality, and every recurring manual judgment creates an opportunity to improve the Decisioning platform.

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