Mortgage Underwriting Subject Matter Expert

Role Overview

As JazzX’s Mortgage Underwriting SME, you will be the single-domain authority for residential mortgage underwriting across product, engineering, and operations. You will own how underwriting decisions are defined, explained, validated, and operationalized into the JazzX Mortgage Application — ensuring that automated underwriting and assistant experiences faithfully reflect real-world practice, are defensible for regulatory and secondary-market needs, and meaningfully improve outcomes across personas (loan officer, processor, underwriter, closer, post-close QC, servicing).

This is a hands-on position. You will perform representative underwriting assessments, translate rules and compensating-factor logic into machine-actionable decisioning, lead validation of AI-assisted underwriting, map persona-driven workflows and handoffs, and train product and operational teams so the application reliably reduces rework and accelerates decision throughput.

What You’ll Do

Hands-On Underwriting & Decision Documentation

• Underwrite a representative set of U.S. residential mortgage loans (purchase, rate-term refinance, cash-out, manual AUS, AUS overrides) and document outcomes in a compliance-ready format (approve/suspend/decline + detailed rationale, conditions, and exception handling).
• Capture decision rationale tied to policy, compensating factors, AUS findings, and investor requirements so engineers and product teams can implement exacting rules.

Rule Design & Operationalization

• Decompose underwriting decisions suitable for automation.
• Define fallback logic, explainability requirements, audit trails, and acceptance criteria for automated underwriting features.

Persona & Process Leadership

• Map end-to-end underwriting and fulfillment workflows across personas (loan officer, processor, underwriter, closer, post-close QC, servicing, investor delivery). Identify handoffs, data dependencies, common failure modes, and opportunities to reduce rework.
• Recommend persona-specific ownership models, SLAs, and escalation paths to improve throughput and accountability.

Model Validation & QA

• Design and run validation programs that blind-test AI/automation outputs against manual underwriter decisions; quantify discrepancies, root causes, and risk.
• Define monitoring metrics and guardrails (automation coverage, decision accuracy, condition clearance rates) and prioritize remediation of high-risk failures.

Condition Lifecycle & LOS Integration

• Specify how underwriting conditions are generated, assigned, prioritized, escalated, and cleared; map condition ownership to personas and LOS fields.
• Partner with LOS/integration SMEs to ensure canonical loan data objects, consistent field mappings, and traceability for underwriting decisions.

Governance, Compliance & Secondary-Market Readiness

• Ensure underwriting logic and automation are defensible for regulatory purposes and secondary-market delivery (post-close QC, investor specs).
• Maintain up-to-date guidance for policy changes and investor/regulatory impacts on underwriting.

Knowledge Transfer & Stakeholder Enablement

• Serve as primary domain reviewer for underwriting product specs, test plans, and release readiness.

What We’re Looking For

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on U.S. residential mortgage underwriting experience in senior or specialist roles, including manual underwriting and AUS override experience.
• Deep, current knowledge of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA, VA, USDA, and other common investors, AUS findings interpretation, compensating factors, and how investor specifications interact with underwriting decisions.
• Demonstrated understanding of the responsibilities, incentives, and information flows for loan officers, processors, underwriters, closers, post-close QC teams, servicing teams, and investor/secondary functions.
• Practical experience with major LOS platforms and the ability to map LOS fields and data schemas to underwriting rules and conditions.
• Strong analytical skills and experience designing validation/QA programs comparing automated outputs to human decisions.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; proven ability to write playbooks, document rationale in an audit-ready way, and teach cross-functional teams.

Skills & Competencies

• Ability to translate complex underwriting policy into actionable rules and traceable decision records.
• Comfort working in cross-functional product and engineering settings; able to specify field mappings, and acceptance criteria.
• Strong attention to detail and a validation mindset — you can quantify risk, diagnose root causes, and recommend prioritized fixes.
• Influence and leadership: able to partner with product, engineering, data science, and customer operations to drive adoption and change.

Preferred

• Experience at large retail or independent mortgage lenders, investor/servicers, or lender-facing technology vendors.
• Prior involvement in underwriting automation, post-close QC programs, or secondary-market delivery initiatives.
• Advanced degree or certifications related to mortgage lending, risk, or financial services.