Product Owner – Autonomous Lending

Job description

About Allica Bank Allica is the UK’s fastest growing company - and the fastest-growing financial technology (Fintech) firm ever. Our purpose is to help established SMEs, one of the last major underserved opportunities in Fintech. Established SMEs are the backbone of local communities - representing over a third of our economy - yet have been largely neglected both by traditional high street banks and modern fintech providers. Department Description Allica Bank aims to provide Expert Banking for Business Britain by providing excellent customer experience and pioneering technology solutions to facilitate this. The Autonomous Lending tribe runs across multiple business lines including Credit Operations and Underwriting, with a mission to build AI-first lending origination journeys, automating origination capabilities, data flows, and underwriting and operational workflow management. The tribe is a critical driver for Allica to continue to realise its vision of providing a market leading relationship-based banking experience, at a speed and cost to serve the rest of the market cannot match. Role Description The Product Owner will lead the work to define, deliver and manage AI-enabled products across our lending journeys, bringing together product design and thinking with a strong working knowledge of what today’s AI can and cannot do. You will be accountable for the roadmap of your team and for the full product lifecycle: discovery and design, day-to-day delivery, launch and adoption by colleagues and customers, and how risks are addressed once a product is live. You will aim to build robust, automated and well-governed systems and processes that enable us to move quickly and innovate our lending and financing products in the SME banking market. Whilst a lot of the market aims to avoid the complex nature of SME businesses, we are going for it head on, designing simple and efficient solutions to the most complex problems in the market to provide excellent and efficient customer experience. We aim for our external view of the lending product, as well as our internal systems to be the best in market which will allow us to scale quickly to serve more UK SMEs, while doing so in a cost-effective manner. Principal Accountabilities - Responsible for innovation and building end-to-end solutions for AI-enabled lending product, origination, underwriting and operational flows - Lead a small cross-functional team (e.g. a full stack engineer and AI specialist) to deliver your roadmap - Continuously review business needs, refine priorities and iterate towards measurable outcomes – judged on fewer requests for further information, more applications decided with AI, less colleague time per application across underwriting and credit operations, and risk outcomes no worse than the equivalent manual journey - Prototype and experiment quickly – vibe-code working prototypes yourself, close enough to the real thing that an engineer can harden it into production code - Determine the accuracy of AI solutions by analysing the data yourself and building the verified “ground truth” datasets that results are tested against, working with underwriters and credit operations colleagues to agree what a correct answer looks like - Take responsibility for launch and adoption – briefing stakeholders, training the teams who will use the product, and closing the loop on the feedback they give back - Produce the written work that keeps delivery moving and safe – clear descriptions of what we are building and why, a record of the important design decisions and trade-offs made, and the assessments needed to get a product approved and live, covering risk, security, cost, data and legal considerations, and taking the change through the bank’s governance and approval process - Line manage, coach and develop your team, setting a high bar for delivery and for the responsible use of AI Personal Attributes & Experience - Knowledge of commercial lending origination and underwriting processes, principles and systems - Experience in a fast-moving or high-growth business - Proven track record of delivering agentic and data-driven products into live use - Strong process design, implementation and automation skills - Hands-on familiarity with Python, SQL and data analytics tools, alongside LLM tooling, prompt engineering and AI orchestration – you do not need to be an engineer or an analyst, but you should be able to build something that works, query the data yourself, and understand and sense-check what AI is producing - Understanding of privacy and safety considerations when applying LLMs in production, and of how to prove and monitor accuracy once a solution is live – ideally in a regulated environment - Strong analytical skills and business acumen, comfortable digging into data yourself to size a problem, measure performance and assemble the reference datasets accuracy is judged against - Metric and outcome driven approach – setting the measures up front, tracking them once a product is live, and stopping work that is not moving them - Experience working with or leading product and engineering teams, and comfortable in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where the problem is as novel as the solution Working at Allica Bank At Allica Bank we want to ensure our employees have the right tools and environment in which to succeed in their role and in support of our customers. Our employees are at the heart of everything we do, so our benefits are designed with you in mind: - Full onboarding support and continued development opportunities - Options for flexible working - Regular social activities - Pension contributions - Discretionary bonus scheme - Private health cover - Life assurance - Family friendly policies including enhanced Maternity & Paternity leave Don’t tick every box? Don’t worry if you don’t have all the skills or requirements listed on the job description. If you think you’ll be a good fit, we’d still love to hear from you! Flexible working We know the ‘9-to-5’ isn’t right for everyone. That’s why Allica Bank is fully committed to flexible and hybrid working. Please let us know what is best for you and, if we can, we will do our best to accommodate. Diversity We’re a diverse bunch here at Allica, with all kinds of experiences, backgrounds and lifestyles. Our openness and differences make us stronger, and we want everybody to feel comfortable bringing as much of themselves to work with them as they like.