Director Emerging Technology

About the role

Finance of America helps homeowners 55+ access the equity they’ve built while staying in full control of their home and their financial future. Through a range of reverse mortgage solutions, we help customers shape the retirement they’ve earned while continuing to evolve how we serve and work together. Joining Finance of America now means stepping into a period of momentum and growth, with teams actively shaping what comes next and opportunities to make an impact and grow your career.

Responsibilities

• Leads and manages resources across multiple Innovation programs including, but not limited to Data Science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.
• Supports the enterprise strategy through a balance of long-range planning and objectives, budget management, vendor selection, and tactical solutions that immediately reduce friction in core data engineering and access disciplines or otherwise add direct and tangible business value.
• Oversees and fuses comprehensive data operations programs into the risk and privacy frameworks that surround them.
• Provides strategic leadership to the Emerging Tech Programs across Finance of America Companies to ensure consistent and high-quality emerging technology management in support of sustain, optimize, and transform business objectives.
• Serves as an expert advisor to senior management in the development, implementation, and maintenance of information systems to ensure best practice control objectives are achieved in protecting information assets.
• Leads Innovation compliance and risk initiatives with stakeholders across technology teams and business units to drive awareness of, and compliance with, SOX IT General Controls and FFIEC best practices.
• Facilitates a metrics and reporting framework to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of the program, including success measures for experimental tech use cases and pilot programs.
• Designs, implements, and monitors a comprehensive innovation vision and strategy that is aligned to organizational priorities and enables the organization's business objectives as defined in its Objective Key Result (OKR) framework or otherwise expressed.
• Exposes the corporate environment to use cases that can facilitate process optimization, data mining, marketing campaigns, or other areas relevant to core business operations.
• Empowers Finance of America Companies’ pursuit of effective technology selection programs through the direct reduction of cost or the contribution to growth.
• Communicates Emerging Technology goals, vision, strategy, and polices across Finance of America Companies in partnership with Legal, Privacy, 2nd Line Risk Management, the Technology Risk Management Team and a broad cross-section of business partners as well as the general user population.
• Captures and analyzes data using data science techniques and tools to generate insights and solutions from various sources of data, such as internal databases, external APIs, web scraping, or natural language processing.
• Develops and deploys data-driven products and services that enhance Finance of America Companies' operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and competitive edge.
• Establishes best practices and standards for data science projects, ensuring ethical, secure, and scalable use of data across the organization.
• Applies machine learning techniques and algorithms to create, train, and evaluate predictive models that can support various business functions and decisions.
• Utilizes various frameworks and platforms to implement machine learning solutions, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, AWS SageMaker, or Azure Machine Learning.
• Keeps abreast of the latest developments and trends in machine learning research and practice, and identifies opportunities for innovation and improvement.

Qualifications

• A minimum of 10 years of risk management, AI, and information technology fields, with 10 years of progressive management experience, including 4 years in a senior management role required.
• 10 years demonstrated senior corporate leadership experience, ideally in building programs across a diversified organization preferred.
• Experience functioning at senior levels in adaptive, evolving environments across financial services preferred.
• Project management experience with excellent analytical/problem solving skills.
• Experience managing large budgets and identifying cost efficiencies.
• Knowledge of key U.S. laws and regulations relating to financial services technology and artificial intelligence.
• Understanding of technologies underpinning the lending process.
• Ability to pivot abruptly to try new ideas, discard underperforming concepts in flight, and modify the functional model of the program itself to account for new technological developments or business circumstance.
• Appetite for exploring new solutions in industry, both commercial and open source.
• Strong decision-making capabilities, with a proven ability to weigh the relative costs and benefits of potential actions and identify the most appropriate action(s).
• Ability to take initiative, work autonomously, and drive projects forward to completion while prioritizing effectively, managing multiple matters, and meeting deadlines.
• Ability to present complex material in an easily understandable format (written or oral) and communicate effectively across groups, including executives, with varying levels of technology knowledge to build effective partnerships with open communication.
• Highly motivated with an ability to manage open-ended challenges and comfortable working amidst structural uncertainty to bring order and process where there is none.
• Ability to stay abreast of rapidly changing technologies and ideas across the lending space.