The Team 

Upstart’s Small Dollar Loans (SDL) and Cash Line ML teams sits at the center of our mission to expand access to credit for those who need it most. SDL provides short-term personal loans; Cash Line, our soon-to-launch subscription-based line of credit, offers ongoing flexibility for customers often left out of traditional lending. Both products aim to ease financial strain and improve long-term outcomes for underserved borrowers.

This high-performing team of scientists and engineers, soon to be led by you, builds and refines the core underwriting and pricing models behind these products. These are Upstart’s most innovative and experimental systems - applying ML not only to predict credit risk but also to optimize the costs of lending so we can expand approvals while keeping borrowing affordable. You’ll advance these systems end-to-end: improving risk separation, refining cost models, and designing the decision logic that translates model outputs into customer-facing decisions. You’ll also lead 0→1 efforts that establish new ML capabilities, particularly for Cash Line.

You’ll collaborate closely with GMs, Product, and Engineering to drive these products from experimentation to scale.

How you'll make an impact:

• Drive early ML innovation for Cash Line, developing and refining our first suite of models for customer behavior (churn, draw, graduate, default)
• Improve and evolve SDL underwriting models and efficiency, and explore convergence opportunities with personal loan models to ensure a unified, scalable approach to small-dollar credit
• Design or refine decision engines that translate model predictions into accurate, transparent, and customer-friendly lending outcomes
• Develop and validate robust model performance metrics that build confidence in our systems and unlock resilient, low-cost capital from investors
• Foster a culture of technical rigor, fast learning, and pragmatic execution within a small, high-talent team operating at the frontier of Upstart’s lending innovation
• Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, Capital Markets, and Data Analytics to align ML solutions with product strategy, business goals, and financial performance.
• Attract, mentor, and grow a top-tier team of ML scientists passionate about expanding access to credit.

What we're looking for:

• Minimum Qualifications
  • Experience
    • 6+ years of experience developing and deploying machine learning models in production with direct customer and financial impact.
    • Proven track record of leading high-impact ML initiatives from research through productionization.
    • Advanced degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Economics or a related field.
  • Technical abilities and aptitude
    • Strong technical judgment and ability to dive deep into model design, data analysis, and evaluation. 
    • Keen statistical, economic and business intuition, and comfort with reasoning under uncertainty and data limitations.
    • Knowledge of production ML, ability to adapt to new tech stacks and get in the weeds of work output from the team. 
    • Excited and able to make direct technical contributions when needed.
  • Leadership
    • Exceptional leadership skills with experience developing teams of highly technical ML scientists.
    • Attract, mentor, and grow a top-tier team of ML scientists passionate about expanding access to credit.
    • Proven ability to influence and collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Capital Markets and other teams.
    • Strong project management skills with experience scaling processes and operational workflows.
• Preferred Qualifications
  • PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, Economics or a related field.
  • Proven success building and scaling new ML products from inception.
  • Familiarity with small-dollar lending, lines of credit, or other consumer finance products. But experience only in competitors and traditional financial institutions is a minus. 
  • Hands-on familiarity with end-to-end ML infrastructure, including experimentation pipelines, feature stores, and model monitoring. Ability to uplevel team’s engineering practices and drive cross-functional engineering design.

Position Location - This role is available in the following locations: US Remote

Time Zone Requirements - This team operates on the East/West Coast time zones.

Travel Requirements - This team has regular on-site collaboration sessions. These occur 3-4 days per quarter at one of our offices. If you need to travel to make these meetups, Upstart will cover all travel related expenses.

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