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Manager – Residential Mortgage Underwriting

Role Overview

As a Manager – Residential Mortgage Underwriting at JazzX AI, you will lead a team of residential mortgage underwriting consultants responsible for translating real-world underwriting expertise into scalable, AI-powered mortgage underwriting solutions.

You will be responsible for team management, underwriting quality, process governance, and domain leadership, while partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and AI teams to ensure underwriting logic, risk assessment, and decisioning accurately reflect industry standards and GSE guidelines.

The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on experience in residential mortgage underwriting, proven people-management capabilities, and the ability to translate complex underwriting decisions into structured rules, workflows, and actionable feedback for technology teams.

Key Responsibilities

1. Team Leadership & People Management

• Lead, mentor, and manage a team of residential mortgage underwriting consultants.

• Allocate underwriting assignments and ensure timely completion of deliverables.

• Review team performance, productivity, quality, and adherence to underwriting standards.

• Conduct regular 1:1s, provide coaching and feedback, and support professional development.

• Build a culture of accountability, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.

• Identify skill gaps and drive training and upskilling initiatives for the underwriting team.

2. Underwriting Quality & Governance

• Oversee underwriting of residential mortgage loan files, including purchase, rate-term refinance, and cash-out refinance transactions.

• Ensure underwriting decisions align with Fannie Mae DU and Freddie Mac LP guidelines, investor requirements, and applicable lending policies.

• Review complex, high-risk, and exception files and provide guidance to the team on appropriate decisions.

• Establish quality standards and conduct periodic reviews/audits of underwriting decisions.

• Identify recurring errors, risk patterns, and process gaps and implement corrective actions.

• Ensure consistency and accuracy in underwriting decisions across the team.

3. Process Mapping & Underwriting Rule Development

• Lead the team in deconstructing end-to-end mortgage underwriting workflows.

• Translate underwriting policies and guidelines into clear decision points, rules, and workflows.

• Identify critical underwriting scenarios, exceptions, edge cases, and compensating factors.

• Partner with Product and Engineering teams to convert underwriting expertise into AI-enabled decisioning logic.

• Ensure business rules and underwriting workflows remain aligned with evolving GSE and industry requirements.

4. AI Model Validation & Product Collaboration

• Lead the validation of AI-generated underwriting recommendations against expert manual underwriting decisions.

• Establish structured review frameworks and quality benchmarks for AI outputs.

• Analyze discrepancies between AI recommendations and human underwriting decisions.

• Provide actionable feedback to Product, Data Science, and Engineering teams to improve models, rules, and confidence thresholds.

• Prioritize underwriting scenarios based on risk, business impact, and frequency.

• Act as the primary mortgage underwriting SME for technology and product teams.

5. Knowledge Management & Training

• Develop and maintain underwriting playbooks, SOPs, decision trees, and knowledge repositories.

• Lead training sessions and workshops on complex underwriting topics.

• Coach underwriters on areas such as income analysis, asset verification, credit assessment, collateral, AUS findings, exceptions, and GSE compliance.

• Ensure consistent interpretation and application of underwriting guidelines across the team.

• Stay current with changes to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, investor, and industry guidelines and communicate relevant updates to the team.

6. Stakeholder Management

• Serve as the key underwriting point of contact for Product, Engineering, AI/ML, and Operations teams.

• Communicate underwriting risks, trends, challenges, and recommendations to senior stakeholders.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define requirements and acceptance criteria for underwriting-related products and features.

• Manage escalations and provide expert guidance on complex underwriting scenarios.

• Represent the underwriting function in product reviews, calibration sessions, and business discussions.

7. Continuous Improvement

• Identify opportunities to improve underwriting efficiency, accuracy, and consistency through automation and process optimization.

• Analyze team and underwriting performance metrics to identify improvement opportunities.

• Drive standardization of underwriting processes and decision-making.

• Support initiatives aimed at reducing manual effort while maintaining underwriting quality and risk controls.

Required Qualifications

Experience

• 12–15 years of experience in residential mortgage underwriting, preferably with 3+ years in a team-lead/managerial or underwriting SME capacity.

• Strong experience managing or mentoring a team of mortgage underwriters.

• Hands-on experience with purchase, rate-term refinance, and cash-out refinance transactions.

• Experience handling complex underwriting scenarios and escalations.

GSE & Underwriting Expertise

• Deep working knowledge of Fannie Mae DU and/or Freddie Mac LP guidelines.

• Strong understanding of:

  • Borrower credit assessment

  • Income calculation and analysis

  • Asset verification

  • Employment verification

  • Property/collateral assessment

  • DTI/LTV/CLTV

  • AUS findings

  • Manual underwriting

  • AUS overrides

  • Compensating factors

  • Underwriting exceptions

  • GSE compliance

Leadership

• Proven ability to manage, coach, and develop underwriting teams.

• Strong quality-control mindset with the ability to establish and maintain underwriting standards.

• Demonstrated experience handling escalations and complex underwriting decisions.

Analytical & Communication Skills

• Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

• Ability to clearly articulate complex underwriting decisions and convert them into structured rules and workflows.

• Comfortable working with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Technology & AI Collaboration

• Experience working with mortgage technology, automation, decision engines, or AI/ML initiatives is highly desirable.

• Ability to translate domain expertise into business rules, workflows, decision trees, and test cases.

• Comfortable reviewing and challenging technology-generated recommendations based on underwriting expertise.