Responsibilities
- Lead modernization initiatives of student-loan servicing platforms: assess legacy codebases, map migration paths (on-prem → cloud), and oversee refactoring or re-engineering efforts.
- Define the business capabilities and customer journeys for student loan origination, servicing, repayment (including deferment, forbearance, and income-driven repayment), and any special servicing workflows.
- Translate business objectives into functional specifications, partnering with architects/engineers to ensure solution delivery across workstreams (product, IT, operations, and compliance).
- Conduct financial analyses, risk assessments, regulatory reviews, and operational readiness audits specifically for student-loan products (e.g., compliance with federal/state regulations, servicing standards, reporting requirements).
- Partner with cross-functional teams (product, operations, IT, legal/compliance, customer experience) to ensure business goals, systems capabilities, and compliance frameworks are aligned and integrated into the operating model.
Required Experience
- 5+ years of experience in student lending or consumer/education lending, ideally within financial institutions or fintechs undergoing transformation of servicing/loan platforms.
- Strong working knowledge of the student-loan lifecycle (origination, servicing, repayment, default resolution, refinancing) and relevant regulatory frameworks (federal & state) and servicing standards.
- Proven ability to lead stakeholder management
- Demonstrated expertise in legacy system modernization, cloud platforms (AWS preferred), and an enterprise-architecture vantage point.
- Hands-on experience with SQL.
- Familiarity with Oracle or similar enterprise data stacks
- Comfort with data engineering concepts in a financial services context.
- Solid understanding of compliance and risk analytics in lending (incl. loan conversion projects, servicing system replacements, data-migration risk, audit readiness).
- Excellent communication skills and ability to convey complex technical/operational concepts to both business and IT audiences.
- Track record of leading technology initiatives — e.g., loan-servicing system replacements, platform rollout, servicing conversion, cloud migration, or legacy carve-outs.
Preferred Experience
- Experience working in a regulated environment (e.g., US federal student loans, private-student-loan market).
- Familiarity with digital onboarding and customer-experience design for lending products.
- Experience managing vendor relationships (servicers, technology platform providers, data-migration partners).
- Ability to build and interpret key metrics (e.g., loan-servicing cost per account, servicing turnaround times, borrower default/rehabilitation rates, data-migration error rates).
Top Skills
What We Do
Doran Jones Inc. (DJI) is the leading financial services Data Engineering and Application Development firm, specializing in Capital Markets, Risk, and Regulatory Compliance. We are US-based, helping our clients fill gaps in capacity and expertise, reduce risk, and accelerate change. Our leaders average over 25 years of experience in Financial Services and Technology. DJI is repeatedly engaged by the largest and most complex clients for our Agile transformation expertise and practical understanding of the critical relationship between data, architecture, and application development.
DJI has a mission to place more people from non-traditional backgrounds into sustainable technology careers. Through partnerships with non-profit technology programs in underserved communities and Veteran organizations, candidates transition from tech training programs into real IT careers at DJI. Our unique recruitment policy allows us to create exceptional teams, bringing a broad spectrum of experience to our company and creating anything but a traditional consulting firm.
DJI is a wholly-owned subsidiary of McLaren Strategic Ventures, a private equity firm, that invests in start-ups and scale-ups. They provide a full range of highly trusted domain consulting, advisory services, and innovative technologies globally. Doran Jones is able to offer a broad range of technology, deeper AI and machine learning tools, data intelligence, alternative resourcing capabilities, and capital access to invest and digitize at scale. Our clients benefit from this unique portfolio allowing them to accelerate the pace of their own digital transformations through innovative products and services designed around industry-wide issues.
