Credit Strategy Principal

Job description

About Wayflyer Today's small businesses need a capital provider that keeps pace with their growth ambitions. Traditional financing options are slow, cumbersome and often out of reach. That's why we built Wayflyer. Our technology allows us to assess businesses in minutes, generate financing offers that reflect their growth potential and send funds in as little as 24 hours. To date, we've deployed over $6bn to thousands of businesses worldwide, backed by Tier 1 banks like J.P. Morgan. You'll be collaborating with ambitious colleagues from around the world. We have offices in Dublin, London, New York, Charlotte, Berlin and Sydney. The Challenge Wayflyer takes credit risk across every segment we lend into, and that risk needs guardrails that hold up under growth, not just on a slide. Right now, we need someone to own two of Credit Strategy's four pillars, the policies and frameworks that govern how we lend, and the underwriting engine that decides who gets funded and how fast. Get this right and we grow faster with more discipline, not less. What You'll Actually Do - Design, own, and continuously improve the credit policies and frameworks that govern lending across all customer segments, built to enable growth, not just guard against it. - Turn Wayflyer's risk appetite into frameworks people can actually use: underwriting rules, portfolio limits, approval authorities, all of it measurable. - Design the frameworks that let new products and new markets launch within Wayflyer's risk appetite, not around it, you're in the room for new product development and market entry from the start. - Sit between Risk, Finance, Legal, and Revenue and make sure policy works for all of them, practical, compliant, and aligned with what our funding partners need. - Use loss experience and portfolio performance to keep policy current, not theoretical, and bring senior leadership real trade-offs as trends emerge. - Rebuild underwriting from the ground up where it's slow or manual: find the friction, design new playbooks by segment, fix it. - Build standardised risk scorecards from design to production, working directly with Decision Science on the model and Engineering on the tooling. - Bring new data into underwriting, bureau, alternative, whatever moves the needle, and run vendor evaluation end to end. - Own the override taxonomy and the feedback loop that turns override and outcome data back into sharper policy and better-calibrated scorecards. - Build the policy architecture for underwriting that's increasingly automated and lower-touch, as more of this function becomes AI-enabled. - Use AI tools as a default, not a novelty, generating credit packs, underwriting memos, and scenario analysis, then applying your own judgement to validate and finalise them. - Feed segment-level insight, concentration risk, vintage curves, trends, into the monthly reporting pack and Board materials, partnering with the data team to get there. What This Role Could Turn Into This is a new role, we haven't hired for it before, so we won't pretend there's a well-worn path to point to. What we can tell you is the shape of it: own two pillars of Credit Strategy this well, and Director or Head of Credit Strategy is a realistic next step, not a stretch. More broadly, owning policy and underwriting at this level tends to be the kind of experience that opens doors into wider Risk or Underwriting leadership as Wayflyer grows into new products and markets. Where exactly it leads is genuinely up to you and how you build it. Who Thrives Here Someone who's built a policy or underwriting process from nothing before, not just operated inside one someone else designed. You spot a gap in a framework and you don't wait for permission to close it, including when a risk event or a regulatory change means you need a fast, well-reasoned answer under real pressure. You think in frameworks, not exceptions, but you're comfortable being the exception when the moment calls for it. You already use AI tools daily as part of how you think and work, not as an occasional shortcut, and you know the difference between AI-assisted output and output you'd actually put your name on. We Hire for Range This is a senior, build-and-own role, so we're looking for someone whose trajectory shows it: a history of taking policies, frameworks, or scorecards from first principles to production, working directly with Engineering and Data Science along the way, not just reviewing their output. That trajectory typically comes with 8–10+ years in credit risk, policy design, or risk governance, fintech, alternative lending, or commercial banking backgrounds all count, but we care more about what you've built than how long you've been building it. Exposure to lending in the SME or e-commerce sector with knowledge on working capital and term lending products (MCAs, STLs, RCFs, LOCs) are all a plus. An advanced degree or certification in finance, economics, or risk, CFA, FRM, or similar, is a bonus, not a bar. Location and Working Policy 📍Dublin or London, hybrid (3 days per week in the office) The Good Stuff 25 days off, plus public holidays. Private healthcare, life insurance, and critical illness cover. Equity - because you should own a piece of what you're building. Generous parental and adoptive leave for primary and secondary caregivers. And 60 days a year to work abroad from wherever you want. By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Wayflyer Limited will process your personal data for the purpose of evaluating your suitability for the role. Such processing is based on the need to take steps prior to entering into a potential employment agreement. To learn more about how we handle your personal data, you can contact our privacy team at privacy@wayflyer.com or review our privacy notice at https://wayflyer.com/privacy-notice. #LI-CH1 #LI-Hybrid