Senior Manager, Vendor Management

The Team: 

Upstart’s Secured Lending organization is building the first-line risk and control infrastructure that will support the next stage of growth across home equity line of credit, auto direct, and auto indirect dealer products. The team helps ensure secured lending products operate with clear governance, durable controls, high-quality execution, and readiness for bank partner and regulatory review.

Vendor Management is the first-line function responsible for business oversight of the critical third parties and outsourced activities that secured lending depends on to originate, close, and service loans. The function works within Upstart’s enterprise third-party risk management framework to ensure vendor relationships are properly documented, monitored, escalated, and managed according to their risk and criticality.

As the Senior Manager, Vendor Management at Upstart, you will build and lead this function end-to-end, reporting directly to the Head of Secured Lending. You will lead a small team and partner closely with Operations, Compliance, Legal, Technology, Product, Enterprise Risk, and business owners to establish the vendor oversight framework, monitoring cadence, issue management routines, and governance documentation needed to support a durable, exam-ready vendor management program.

How you’ll make an impact

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Produce clear, inspection-ready vendor oversight documentation, including performance reporting, risk assessments, issue logs, business reviews, evidence packages, and executive summaries for bank partner and regulatory review

Minimum Qualifications 

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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 and conduct monitoring), affiliate or fintech platform relationships, appraisal management companies, title and settlement providers, or credit reporting and data vendors.
• Knowledge of consumer lending operations, servicing controls, complaint or error resolution, credit reporting oversight, data quality, vendor controls, or consumer compliance risk.
• Skilled in producing exam-ready vendor oversight documentation, performance reports, risk assessments, issue tracking, governance materials, policies and procedures, and executive summaries.

Position location This role is available in the following locations: Remote 

Time zone requirements The team operates on the East/West coast time zones. 

Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are encouraged to to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions’ cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time.

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