About the company:

Our client is a high-growth fintech in the education financing space, serving thousands of institutions across India, from universities to K-12 schools. Having scaled rapidly, the business is now sharpening its credit and underwriting engine to support the next phase of sustainable growth. This role sits at the centre of that effort.

The role:

This is a hands-on credit underwriting leadership role, not an analytics one. The Assistant Vice President, Risk Management will own manual underwriting and customer-level credit decisions across the unsecured lending book, lead a team of underwriters and credit operations analysts, and bring discipline, judgement and speed to how individual cases are assessed and approved. The right person is someone who is comfortable in the detail of a customer case, confident in taking deviation calls, and energised by building and coaching a high-performing underwriting team.

What you will own:

Manual underwriting and credit decisioning:

- Lead manual underwriting and customer-level credit decisions across the lending portfolio, with a strong focus on borderline and higher-risk cases that need careful, case-by-case evaluation.

- Own deviation approvals, exception handling and the judgement calls that sit beyond automated decisioning, while keeping outcomes within approved risk thresholds.

- Review customer cases with the team, set the standard for credit quality, and make sure decisions are sound, consistent and well-reasoned.

MSME and institutional underwriting:

- Run underwriting and risk assessment for MSME and individual borrowers, with a real feel for how customers behave through the lending lifecycle.

- Lead risk due diligence, assessment and onboarding for new institutional partners, including schools, colleges and universities.

Team leadership and operational credit management:

- Hire, mentor, train and manage the credit team on a day-to-day basis, driving productivity, quality and turnaround.

- Coach underwriters through complex cases and build the next layer of credit talent.

- Own operational credit processes end to end, with strong controls, clear audit trails and dependable execution.

Policy, monitoring and the early-warning loop:

- Help shape underwriting policies, proprietary rules and early indicators of credit deterioration, in partnership with the data and analytics team.

- Use collections and delinquency signals to continuously sharpen onboarding and underwriting, so the system improves with every cohort.

- Maintain portfolio performance within approved limits for NPAs, delinquencies and credit losses.

Compliance and cross-functional work:

- Keep underwriting practices aligned with RBI digital lending guidelines, IRDAI requirements and lending partner expectations.

- Partner closely with product, operations, finance, legal, compliance and analytics so risk thinking is built into every stage of the customer and partner lifecycle.

What we are looking for:

- 5 to 10 years of credit experience in a bank or NBFC, with strong, demonstrable manual underwriting expertise and customer-level credit decision making.

- Hands-on experience with MSME underwriting, customer case discussions, deviation approvals, and institutional assessment and onboarding.

- Proven team management experience, with the ability to lead, coach and scale an underwriting team.

- A working understanding of portfolio analytics and reporting is useful, though this role is led by underwriting judgement rather than modelling. Analytics is a supporting capability here, not the core.

- Comfort using modern digital and AI based tools to work faster and sharpen credit decisions is a plus.

- Sound grasp of credit risk fundamentals and the RBI digital lending landscape.

- Strong communication, organisational and people-management skills, and the ability to build a culture of risk awareness across the business.

Preferred:

- An MBA or CA

- We care more about the depth of your underwriting experience and your track record than about the badge alone.

- A background in credit roles in banking or NBFC lending, into credit leadership.