Director of Product, Machine Learning & Decisioning Platforms

The Team:

Upstart is looking for a Director of Product, Machine Learning & Decisioning Platforms to help us achieve our mission of enabling effortless credit based on true risk. This role will lead the product strategy and team responsible for the platforms that power Upstart’s credit decisioning and machine learning platform capabilities. This is a highly technical, platform-focused product leadership role at the core of Upstart’s business. You will manage and develop a team of experienced product managers, set strategy across multiple interconnected product areas, and partner closely with engineering and machine learning leaders to evolve the systems underlying pricing, underwriting, model deployment, and ML innovation.

The ideal candidate is a strong product leader and coach who can bring structure to complex, ambiguous problems; connect technical decisions to business and customer outcomes; and create alignment across teams. While you will remain close to the product, this role is primarily focused on setting direction, developing talent, and enabling your team to deliver high-impact results.

How you’ll make an impact

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of product managers, setting clear priorities and raising the quality of product management across the organization.
• Define the product strategy and roadmap for the platforms powering Upstart’s credit decisioning and machine learning capabilities.
• Partner with engineering and machine learning leaders to improve model development, versioning, deployment, forecasting, experimentation, and monitoring.
• Evolve underwriting and decisioning systems to better connect customer information, model outputs, and business outcomes.
• Identify opportunities to apply machine learning across the business, validate them through focused MVPs, and build the strongest opportunities into scalable products.
• Create scalable processes for evaluating, onboarding, and integrating data vendors and other ML capabilities.
• Balance near-term execution with long-term platform investment, making thoughtful trade-offs across impact, risk, technical complexity, and speed.
• Build alignment across teams and ensure machine learning is incorporated into product strategy from the start.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of product management experience, including experience leading technical or platform products.
• Experience managing and developing product managers, ideally across multiple interconnected teams.
• Strong technical fluency and experience partnering with engineering, machine learning, and data science teams.
• Demonstrated ability to set strategy, navigate ambiguity, and deliver results in a fast-paced environment.
• Strong analytical, organizational, communication, and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to connect technical and product decisions to business outcomes, particularly in credit, lending, or financial services.
• A track record of building strong teams and raising the quality of product management practices.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience as a data scientist, machine learning engineer, or other machine learning individual contributor.
• Experience with model lifecycle management, decisioning systems, experimentation, optimization, or real-time inference platforms.
• Experience building or scaling online financial products, particularly in consumer lending or credit.

Position location

This role is available in the following locations: Remote

Time zone requirements

The team operates on the East/West coast time zones.

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.