Director Of Engineering, Core Pricing

About Upstart

Upstart is the leading AI lending marketplace partnering with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit. By leveraging Upstart's AI marketplace, Upstart-powered banks and credit unions can have higher approval rates and lower loss rates across races, ages, and genders, while simultaneously delivering the exceptional digital-first lending experience their customers demand. More than 80% of borrowers are approved instantly, with zero documentation to upload.

Upstart is a digital-first company, which means that most Upstarters live and work anywhere in the United States. However, we also have offices in San Mateo, California; Columbus, Ohio; and Austin, Texas.

Most Upstarters join us because they connect with our mission of enabling access to effortless credit based on true risk. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Upstart, we’d love to hear from you!

The Team

The Pricing team is responsible for building a best-in-class underwriting platform to quickly and accurately create loan offers for all of Upstart’s loan products like Personal Loans, Auto loans and Home loans. The services owned by the team are responsible for validating applicant data, interfacing with Machine Learning models to calculate borrower risk, and calculating interest rates, fees, etc. We are developing new capabilities for Upstart’s loan products and building a next generation software platform to accelerate innovation on behalf of our customers.

As a Director of Engineering, you will define and drive the long-term vision for our pricing systems. In this highly visible role, you’ll partner with leaders across Product, Machine Learning, Compliance, and Operations to ensure pricing is not just an engine for growth, but also a strategic differentiator for Upstart. You’ll lead multiple engineering teams, set a high bar for excellence, and shape the culture that empowers our engineers to innovate at scale.

How You’ll Make an Impact

• Set Vision and Strategy: Define and communicate the long-term strategy for the pricing platform, ensuring alignment with company objectives, evolving regulatory standards, and customer needs.
  
  
• Build and Scale Teams: Grow and mentor a high-performing, diverse engineering team and an effective management layer. Foster a culture of accountability, technical rigor,  customer-centric thinking, and continuous improvement.
  
  
• Drive Technical Excellence: Guide architectural decisions and oversee the delivery of scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure that accelerates pricing innovation and simplifies compliance.
  
  
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Collaborate with Product, ML, Infrastructure, Compliance, Legal, and Analytics leaders to drive cohesive execution. Act as a thought partner and technical advisor to senior stakeholders across the company.
  
  
• Operational Execution: Establish processes and metrics that ensure high-quality, timely delivery. Drive clarity across multiple workstreams and proactively identify and manage technical and organizational risks. Ensure pricing systems are reliable, performant, and compliant, while enabling faster iteration of ML-driven products.
  
  
• Influence Organizational Outcomes: Shape engineering-wide practices and contribute to Upstart's broader technology strategy as a senior member of the Engineering leadership team.
  
  

Minimum Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with 7+ years in engineering leadership roles.
• Proven success leading and scaling high-performing engineering teams, including managing other managers.
• Deep experience building large-scale, cloud-based distributed systems, ideally in fintech, pricing, or ML-based product environments.
• Strong understanding of modern software engineering practices, microservice architectures, and CI/CD.
• Hands-on experience with cloud technologies (AWS, GCP, or Azure), containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), and scalable API design.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to influence technical and non-technical audiences, including executive leadership.
• Strong analytical, organizational, and strategic thinking skills with a bias for action.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in statistics, economics, or applied ML.
• Track record of shipping dynamic Pricing platforms or Fintech infrastructure at scale.
• Experience leading platform or infrastructure teams in high-growth or regulated environments.
• Strong product mindset with the ability to evaluate trade-offs and drive prioritization d