Senior Manager, Vendor Management

Upstart Upstart · Fintech · Remote · Compliance

Upstart is an AI lending marketplace that uses advanced AI to reduce the cost and complexity of borrowing. This role is for a Senior Manager, Vendor Management within the Secured Lending organization, responsible for building and leading the first-line risk and control infrastructure for secured lending products. The role involves overseeing critical third parties and outsourced activities, ensuring compliance with risk management frameworks, monitoring vendor performance, driving remediation, and maintaining contingency plans. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in third-party risk management within a regulated financial services environment.

What you'd actually do

  1. Build and lead the secured lending first-line vendor oversight function, including the vendor inventory, risk-tiering approach, monitoring cadence, governance reporting, and escalation routines for critical third-party relationships.
  2. Own business oversight of critical vendors and outsourced activities across the third-party risk lifecycle, including due diligence support, contract and service-level tracking, performance monitoring, issue management, and termination or exit planning.
  3. Monitor vendor execution against contractual terms, service standards, data requirements, compliance expectations, and business controls, identifying trends that may create operational, regulatory, consumer impact, or continuity risk.
  4. Drive remediation of vendor performance issues by identifying root causes, aligning owners on corrective actions, tracking issue closure, and escalating material risks to business leaders, Compliance, Legal, Enterprise Risk, and other stakeholders.
  5. Maintain contingency, transition, and exit planning for critical third-party relationships, ensuring vendor dependencies are understood and managed before they create unacceptable concentration, continuity, or operational risk.

Skills

Required

  • 7+ years of experience in third-party risk management, vendor management, financial services operations, operational risk, compliance, or a related function in a regulated financial services environment.
  • Experience overseeing critical vendor relationships or outsourced business activities, including risk tiering, due diligence, ongoing performance monitoring, issue management, and contingency or exit planning.
  • Experience managing vendor execution against contractual terms, service-level expectations, data requirements, control requirements, or business continuity standards.
  • Experience identifying, escalating, and remediating vendor performance deficiencies, compliance findings, operational incidents, consumer impact risks, or fourth-party risks.
  • Experience leading analysts, managing a vendor oversight function, or owning cross-functional third-party risk, operational risk, compliance, or financial services control programs.

Nice to have

  • Experience applying OCC, FFIEC, or equivalent bank regulatory expectations for third-party risk management, including risk-based oversight of critical vendors and outsourced activities in a regulated bank or bank-partner environment.
  • Experience building or maturing a first-line vendor oversight program for a business unit, operating within a 2LOD or enterprise TPRM framework.
  • Experience overseeing one or more of the following vendor or partner types in consumer lending: mortgage subservicers, loan origination system or technology platform vendors, dealer networks (including dealer due diligence a

What the JD emphasized

  • regulated financial services environment
  • critical third-party relationships
  • vendor oversight
  • risk management framework
  • regulatory review