Credit Manager

What is this role about?

As the Credit Manager for Spain, you’ll play a key role in shaping and safeguarding Bondora’s credit risk performance in the Spanish market. You’ll own underwriting strategy, portfolio monitoring, and responsible-lending outcomes end to end. Collaboration is crucial. You’ll work closely with the Country Manager, Product, Data Science, Customer Experience, Legal, Collections, and Finance teams to turn portfolio data into decisions that protect both profitability and compliance. The role combines credit risk expertise, analytical rigour, and commercial judgment, and it gives you real influence over the trajectory of Bondora’s lending business in Spain.

Must-have: Strong practical knowledge of consumer credit risk management and underwriting strategy, advanced Excel and SQL skills, and the judgment to remain personally accountable for credit decisions, policy changes, and regulatory compliance. Spanish consumer credit experience is highly desired.

Your main responsibilities:

• Understand and diagnose the market: develop a detailed understanding of Bondora’s lending product, underwriting flow, customer journey, and country objectives. Combine portfolio data, funnel evidence, customer feedback, manual case reviews, and segment analysis to identify performance issues, calculation errors, fraud patterns, and opportunities.
• Monitor and explain credit performance: build and use dashboards, reports, and databases to track the application funnel, acceptance, offer uptake, limit utilisation, rejection reasons, FPD, recovery rates, PD, profitability, and other agreed indicators. Investigate deviations, explain their drivers, and escalate material issues promptly with recommended actions.
• Evaluate profitability and data value: use cash-flow and lifetime-value models to assess loan and customer profitability and guide credit decisions. Oversee third-party data usage, maximise the value of existing providers, and propose additional data sources where they support country goals.
• Set priorities and maintain the roadmap: translate agreed country goals into a short-term roadmap of up to three months and a clear proposal log. Prioritise initiatives by expected impact, confidence, effort, risk, and dependencies, and keep the Country Manager and cross-functional teams aligned on priorities, requirements, blockers, and delivery.
• Implement credit strategy changes: configure and release approved changes in Taktile, system settings, policy rules, limits, affordability parameters, and other decision components. Maintain change logs, process documentation, and policy records so decisions and outcomes remain traceable.
• Support model and analytical development: provide credit and business expertise throughout scorecard and model development. Independently conduct multivariate analysis using tools and methods agreed with Data Science, and challenge model outputs, assumptions, stability, and operational use.
• Test and optimise: design, implement, and evaluate controlled experiments and A/B tests, measuring both intended and adverse effects. Translate results into decisions and regularly challenge policy rules and affordability settings to improve risk-adjusted profitability.
• Maintain control and human accountability: ensure credit policies, procedures, changes, and outcomes comply with responsible-lending regulation, internal policy, and the country’s risk appetite. Document the decision basis, approvals, monitoring plan, and remediation whenever an outcome falls outside expectations

This role carries direct accountability for credit risk decisions and regulatory outcomes; while AI tools are used to accelerate the work, the accountability itself cannot be delegated or automated.

What would ensure success in this role?

Success in this role is determined by strong credit judgment, analytical rigour, and disciplined governance over decisions that affect the portfolio’s risk and profitability. The ideal candidate will have:

• Strong practical knowledge of consumer credit risk management, underwriting strategies, portfolio monitoring, and responsible lending.
• Spanish consumer credit experience, ideally including Spanish credit bureaus and data (ASNEF/Equifax, Experian, CIRBE), open-banking data, Spanish responsible-lending rules, and Spanish recovery and collections dynamics.
• Ability to connect portfolio performance, unit economics, customer behaviour, and operational evidence to a clear decision.
• Hands-on experience implementing or closely managing decision-engine rules, policy parameters, limits, and experiments.
• Advanced Excel and SQL skills and confidence using Tableau or another BI platform. Python or R is an advantage.
• Ability to perform multivariate analysis, work effectively with Data Science, and assess model quality and operational fit.
• Clear written and verbal communication, sound judgement under uncertainty, and the ability to influence Country, Product, Customer Experience, Legal, Collections, Finance, and Data teams.
• Disciplined documentation, change governance, escalation, and follow-through.
• Ability to use AI tools to accelerate research, analysis, documentation, and hypothesis generation, giving them sufficient context, disclosing material AI use, and distinguishing AI-generated suggestions from verified evidence.
• Discipline to validate AI and model outputs against source data, logic, policy, and independent calculations, rejecting unreliable or unsupported results, while remaining personally accountable for all credit decisions and their compliance.
• Prepare and present a reliable Spain credit committee reporting pack covering the main portfolio trends, risks, explanations, and recommended actions.
• Propose, approve, deploy, and begin measuring at least one credit strategy change and one controlled experiment in Taktile.
• Design a returning-customer credit limit policy using the available cash-flow modelling tools, with clear profitability, risk, compliance, and monitoring logic.
• Establish a prioritised three-month roadmap and proposal log with the Country Manager and relevant cross-functional partners.

Please note: The role of this Credit Manager would focus on expansion across our Spain market however we have our credit team ecosystem built in Latvia and hence location preference is across Madrid, Spain or Latvia.

What can you expect at Bondora? 

• Contribute to Bondora’s ambitious goal of reaching 1BN in revenue. Your skills and efforts will directly impact our growth trajectory and shape the future of our company.

• Own credit performance in one of Bondora's most promising scale-up markets.

• Work across the full lending decision system, from data and models to policy, pricing, limits, affordability, and experiments.

• Join a strong, data-driven credit team with direct access to senior country and functional stakeholders.

• Our employees deserve the best. We recognize our people with a competitive salary and a generous benefits package (5 weeks of vacation, private healthcare compensation, hobby grant, mental healthcare support, share options and much more!)

• We provide an environment that encourages your personal and professional growth. As we constantly evolve and innovate, you’ll have endless opportunities (and budget) to expand your skills and skyrocket your career

The next steps:

If you have the guts, ideas, and a team vision, apply now! 

1. Meet Ariba, our Recruiter: Your first interview with Ariba will give you the chance to share your experiences and aspirations. 
2. Meet with Juris Rieksts-Riekstins, our hiring manager: You can explore more about the role and ask questions about how you can make impact
3. Put your skills to the test: Tackle a home task related to credit management
4. Collaborate with Juris, to review your take home task submission: Go over your submission with the Hiring Manager and share your perspective
5. Complete our assessments: Our personality and logic assessments will help us understand your strengths
6. Business Interview - Meet Jose Maria Lopez Montanez, our Country Manager for Spain: to cover remaining topics 
7. Final Interview - Partel Tomberg: Meet our CEO for an overview 
8. Bar-raiser Interview  - Meet Mirko Adari: Our CPTO as an independent evaluation step and the last one 
9. The celebration begins: If the stars align, receive an offer to join the Bondora team!