About Caribou 

At Caribou, we’re on a mission to put drivers in control of their auto payments. If you got your auto loan at the car dealership, you might be driving around not realizing that you are overpaying on your monthly car payment. By partnering with trusted lenders like credit unions and community banks, we save our customers money by getting them access to great rates and lower monthly payments.

We have grown 20x in the past three years and raised a $115M Series C. We’re built by leaders from the technology, automotive, and finance industries, and we’re proud to be backed by a great team of venture capital investors, including QED Investors, Goldman Sachs, Moderne Ventures, Accomplice, Link Ventures, Motley Fool Ventures and others.

This role requires attendance at occasional in-person team meetings. As a result, candidates must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to be eligible for this position.

About the Job

Caribou is looking for a Director of Lending & Underwriting to build and lead a team of Engineering Managers and engineers, to deliver on the business vision. As a member of Caribou’s Engineering team, you will report to the VP of Engineering and work closely with the product partners to set and execute the vision of building a best-in-class lending and underwriting platform for car refinance and insurance, delivering a portfolio of services to fuel our explosive growth. 

You will oversee engineering teams laying the groundwork for lending and underwriting related services. You will help usher Caribou into providing platforms such as lending-as-a-service and underwriting-as-a-service, along with supporting a sizable contact center. Effective functioning of these engineering teams will allow Caribou to partner with more lenders and capital providers while increasing Caribou’s loan making ability across a wider FICO spectrum.

About the Role

In this role, you will have a broad overview and provide leadership and guidance over people, process and systems. Specifically, you will:

• Be a servant leader overseeing the development and maintenance of critical applications related to lending & underwriting platforms.
• Manage integrations with internal CRM and 3rd party systems at lenders, partners, banks etc to be performant and fault tolerant.
• Influence architecture & design decisions within the Engineering org, ensuring a sound strategy, tooling, developer experience, processes, and clear requirements
• Lead a team of engineering managers to success. You will make hiring decisions, manage performance, and provide ongoing coaching
• Work closely across the Engineering, Product, Sales and data teams to synthesize business needs into an executable vision for the lending and underwriting platforms.
• Be responsible for the overall delivery of project work and support the applications across your organization.
• Define and measure successful engineering outcomes and assume accountability for results while delegating decision-making authority to individual Engineering Managers
• Develop technical strategy on how we can push the boundaries of platform capabilities, and pair with a Product Director on fleshing out how to turn ideas into reality

About You

You are a natural leader and influencer capable of setting a vision for how technology investments enhance a Product and Engineering organization’s ability to deploy software and measure performance. You have:

• 10+ years of experience in engineering leadership roles, including managing a team of engineering leaders.
• 5+ years of experience in building enterprise applications with heavy integrations with 3rd party partners and platforms.
• Experience supporting applications for high volume contact center and external partners.
• Excellent analytical skills, ability to solve problems quickly, establish new frameworks, ability to think on your feet, and see opportunities before others do. You can generalize both problems and solutions.
• Demonstrated continuous improvement across processes and systems using data from the teams and applications under your area of responsibility.
• Experience coordinating the work of multiple engineering teams executing in similar problem spaces to deliver against a shared vision
• Superb verbal and written communication skills with demonstrated experience engaging and influencing executives and evangelizing to stakeholders

How we will take care of you

Everyone at Caribou is a valued team member, and we always strive to live up to our value Take Care of Each Other. Our compensation and benefits package includes: 

• Base salary of $210-230k annually
• Equity in a high growth startup
• Fantastic health, dental, vision, and mental health insurance, where we cover 100% (yes, 100%!) of the premium for you and your family, and a generous PTO plan
• Company-paid for short & long term disability insurance and basic life insurance 
• Optional benefits include HSAs, FSAs, voluntary life insurance, and pet insurance

Our Values

• See people as people
• Take care of each other
• Commit to the mission
• Move quickly and bravely
• Get better every day
• Seek truth

Our Tech stack is not limited to this list but gives you a general flavor of our ecosystem: Rails, Kong, Airflow, Python, Node (NextJs, NestJS), Typescript, GraphQL, Postgres, Google Cloud Platform, Spark, Argo, Docker, Kubernetes, ELK stack, Prometheus, Grafana

Caribou is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, pregnancy status, marital status, military or protected veteran status, genetics, or any other characteristic protected by law. This position is not restricted solely to the responsibilities listed above and the scope and responsibilities are subject to change. A pre-employment background check is required as a condition of employment.