Senior Product Manager - Credit Decisioning Platform

Arlington , United States
Hybrid

AI overview

Own and evolve the Credit Decisioning Platform, leading cross-functional teams to enhance underwriting, eligibility, and risk management capabilities essential for company growth.

At Koalafi, we believe in a world where no one has to put an important purchase on hold. That’s why we’re making it easier for more people to pay for big purchases over time.

Retailers across the country rely on us to offer flexible lease-to-own financing to their non-prime consumers, while increasing sales and strengthening customer loyalty. Their 2M+ customers love us because we provide a flexible way for them to make payments and give them an opportunity to improve their credit. Our 200+ Koalafi teammates enjoy inspiring and challenging work that accelerates their careers.

Interested in learning more about how we’re transforming the financing experience and joining our team?

What You’ll Do

We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager to help own and evolve Koalafi’s Credit Decisioning Platform: the core capabilities that power underwriting, eligibility, pricing, and risk management across our financing products. This platform sits at the intersection of product, engineering, data and risk—and is foundational to Koalafi’s growth, profitability, and customer experience.

You’ll be the embedded, day-to-day Product Manager for the Credit Decisioning engineering team, owning the roadmap, delivery, and performance of the platform. The platform is mid-transformation—we’re rebuilding core infrastructure to be faster, more configurable, and ready to scale, unlocking key company initiatives along the way.

This role is ideal for a systems-minded product manager who thrives when solving hard product and systems problems, where decision logic, data, models, and workflows must work together at scale. You have enough technical fluency to partner closely with engineers, data scientists, and cross-functional stakeholders, and know how to ask strong questions and translate business and credit risk strategy into clear platform capabilities. You’ll align cross-functional leaders on a strategy and roadmap to advance the decisioning platform as an engine for growth and profitability—accelerating new products and partners without compromising risk discipline.

  • Own and drive the roadmap for Koalafi’s Credit Decisioning Platform
    • Lead prioritization and facilitate thoughtful tradeoffs with key stakeholders balancing business impact, risk outcomes, and platform health
    • Align Engineering, Risk, Data Science, and cross-functional stakeholders on what matters most and why
    • Lead ongoing discovery with stakeholders to surface needs and gaps, then translate both business strategy and individual use cases into cohesive, reusable platform capabilities
  • Lead delivery as the embedded product manager for the Credit Decisioning engineering team
    • Partner continuously with engineering to define the what and the why, while empowering the team to determine the how
    • Maintain a prioritized backlog with crisp epics and stories, clear acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes
    • Lead the team’s delivery cadence, participating in agile ceremonies to ship reliably and improve iteration speed
    • Define success metrics and measurement plans, ensure releases are instrumented and outcomes are reviewed post-launch

  • Shape the platform to enable faster risk strategy iteration, seamless multi-merchant journeys, and safe scaling
    • Empower the Risk team to iterate on decisioning logic quickly and safely through configurable, self-serve platform capabilities
    • Build the decisioning platform primitives that unlock seamless, multi-merchant financing journeys for consumers
    • Drive operational excellence by treating performance, reliability, observability, auditability, and decision explainability as foundational requirements

What Success Looks Like

  • Koalafi’s Credit Decisioning Platform is trusted, extensible, and measurably improving business outcomes
  • New products, partners, customer experiences, and decision strategies launch faster because the platform supports evolving needs without rework or fragility
  • Engineers move faster with crisp product direction, strong prioritization, and clear definitions of success
  • Stakeholders understand how decisioning platform investments connect to growth, profitability, customer experience, and long-term value

About You

  • 5+ years of product management experience with a focus on building and shipping technical, data-driven platforms
  • Proven ability to operate in technically sophisticated domains, with the fluency to engage deeply with engineers, data scientists, and analysts
  • Strong systems thinker who can translate business needs into platform capabilities that scale across products, strategies, and use cases
  • Experience using data, experimentation, and metrics to inform prioritization and evaluate success of platform investments
  • Demonstrated judgment in balancing short-term business needs with long-term platform health and scalability
  • Ability to lead and influence cross-functional teams towards a common goal
  • Excellent communicator who brings clarity and builds alignment across diverse stakeholders; capable of communicating at multiple altitudes—from executive strategy discussions to in-the-weeds technical conversations
  • Comfortable operating in ambiguous environments where decisions matter, and able to create clarity, structure and momentum over time
  • Location Requirement: This position requires regular in-person attendance at one of our two office locations (Richmond, VA or Arlington, VA). Candidates must already be located within a commutable distance to either location, as relocation assistance is not available at this time.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience in fintech, lending, credit risk, fraud risk, or decisioning platforms/systems
  • Familiarity with the machine learning model lifecycle, including development, deployment, monitoring, and iteration in production systems
  • Exposure to regulatory, compliance, or risk management frameworks in financial services

Why choose Koalafi: A career at Koalafi means opportunities to tackle exciting challenges every single day. We take pride in a culture of innovation, trust, and ownership. You'll get outside your comfort zone, build meaningful relationships, and most of all, take charge of projects that ultimately help people get the things they need most.

Benefits:

At Koalafi, you will have a direct impact on our products and help shape the company’s success. We offer competitive compensation & benefits packages to keep you at your best:

  • Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
  • 20 PTO days + 11 paid holidays
  • 401(k) retirement with company matching
  • Student Loan & Tuition Reimbursement 
  • Commuter assistance
  • Parental leave (maternal + paternal)
  • Inclusion and Associate Engagement Programs

Who we are & what we value: 

  • We focus on what’s most important
  • We set clear expectations and deliver
  • We embrace challenges to reach our full potential
  • We ask, “How can this be better?”
  • We move fast together

Perks & Benefits Extracted with AI

  • Health Insurance: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
  • Other Benefit: Commuter assistance
  • Paid Parental Leave: Parental leave (maternal + paternal)
  • Paid Time Off: 20 PTO days + 11 paid holidays
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