Technical Product Manager - Data Platform & Strategy

Founded in 2009, Zest AI has been pioneering innovative AI technology with a mission to expand credit access to create opportunities for more Americans to pursue their financial goals. Zest AI is transforming the $17 trillion US consumer credit market by delivering AI technology that helps lenders identify creditworthy borrowers overlooked by traditional methods, while leveling the playing field so financial institutions of all sizes can harness AI to provide better lending experiences.

With over 50 issued and pending patents across automation, accuracy, performance, and model explainability, Zest AI is a leader in financial technology, providing financial institutions with AI tools that create a more resilient US financial system and a stronger U.S. economy. With over 600 active AI models, financial institutions rely on Zest AI's comprehensive suite of solutions spanning marketing, underwriting, fraud detection, lending intelligence, and more to make smarter lending decisions while improving profitability. This US-based technology as a service company is headquartered in Los Angeles, California.

About the role We are looking for a Technical Product Manager (TPM) to own our end-to-end data strategy - from how we source data from clients across their many systems, to how we store, govern, and use that data across the company and our products. This person will define a unified data strategy and manage the intake of data into our data consortiums, ensuring every product we build is powered by data that is timely, complete, and trustworthy.

The ideal candidate is both deeply technical and product-oriented - able to treat data as a product in its own right, balancing client onboarding speed, internal consumer needs, and the platform investments that make our data foundation scalable, efficient, and future-ready.

Job Responsibilities

• Own the Unified Data Strategy: Define and drive a company-wide data strategy and roadmap that aligns how data is sourced, stored, governed, and consumed across all products and teams.
• Streamline Client Data Sourcing: Design efficient, repeatable ways to ingest data from clients across diverse systems (core banking, loan origination, CRMs, data warehouses, flat files, APIs), reducing onboarding time and manual effort.
• Manage Data Consortium Intake: Own the processes, standards, and tooling for bringing client data into our data consortiums - including contribution requirements, quality thresholds, normalization, and how consortium data is packaged to serve our various products.
• Data Architecture & Storage: Partner with data engineering to define how data is modeled, stored, and organized (lakes, warehouses, schemas, lineage) so it is discoverable, reusable, and cost-efficient.
• Data Quality & Governance: Establish standards for data quality, validation, lineage, privacy, retention, and access controls; ensure compliance with contractual, regulatory, and security requirements.
• Enable Data Consumers: Work with data science, analytics, and product teams to understand how data is used for model training, analytics, and customer-facing features, and prioritize the improvements that unlock the most value.
• Bridge Technical and Business Worlds: Translate complex data engineering needs into clear business priorities and vice versa, enabling alignment across engineering, data science, client delivery, and leadership.
• Metrics-Driven Decision Making: Define KPIs for data onboarding time, pipeline reliability, data freshness, quality, coverage, and consortium growth; use them to drive prioritization and iteration.
• Stakeholder Communication: Clearly communicate priorities, trade-offs, and progress to executive, technical, client-facing, and non-technical audiences.
• Data Cost Management: Own the budget for data spend across vendors and third-party data sources; monitor usage and costs against plan, identify optimization opportunities

Skills

• 3+ years of product management experience, ideally focused on data platforms, data products, or data infrastructure.
• Strong technical background - experience as a data engineer, analytics engineer, software engineer, or solutions architect is a major plus.
• Hands-on familiarity with modern data stacks: ETL/ELT pipelines, data warehouses and lakes (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery), orchestration, and cloud infrastructure.
• Comfort with SQL and data modeling; able to dig into data directly to validate assumptions and diagnose issues.
• Understanding of data governance, quality, lineage, and privacy practices; experience in regulated industries (e.g., financial services) is a plus.
• Experience integrating data from many external sources or clients, ideally with multi-party or consortium data models.
• Proven ability to manage competing priorities across client needs, internal data consumers, and technical debt reduction.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to articulate technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Experience working with cross-functional teams spanning data engineering, data science, client delivery, and operations.

Success in This Role You'll succeed if you:

• Deliver a unified data strategy that the whole company understands and builds on.
• Make client data onboarding measurably faster, cheaper, and more reliable.
• Grow our data consortiums with high-quality, well-governed data that directly powers our products.
• Advocate for data quality, accessibility, and trust as product features in their own right.

Perks and benefits All Zestys experience:

• The opportunity to join a mission-focused company
• People – the best part of Zest
• Robust medical, dental and vision insurance plans
• Annual bonus plan participation
• 401(k) with generous match
• Employee Awards and Recognition
• 11 company holidays
• Winter break (office closed between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day)
• Unlimited vacation time
• Employee Resource Groups and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion forums
• Generous family leave policy (12 week maternity leave / 6 week paternity leave)
• Phone and internet allowance
• Employee gatherings, including quarterly Town Hall meetings

Our Burbank, CA area, hybrid model (typically 1 day/week) Zestys also enjoy:

• Complimentary daily lunches from LA’s best restaurants and a fully stocked kitchen
• Beautiful, modern, dog-friendly office with lounge and gaming areas
• Complimentary manicures, pedicures, and mindfulness sessions
• Reimbursable membership to the onsite gym
• Company happy hours, social events, outings, volunteer opportunities and much more!
• Onsite car wash service

About Zest AI: Creating a diverse and inclusive culture where all are welcomed, valued, and empowered to achieve our full potential is important to who we are and where we’re headed in the future. We know that unique backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives help us think bigger, spark innovation, and succeed together. Zest is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion and encourages professionals from underrepresented groups in technology and financial services to apply.

Our core values are Collaboration, Communication, Client-centricity, Bias for Action, and Heart.

Learn more at Zest.ai and connect with us on Twitter@Zest_AI or our Insights blog (https://www.zest.ai/cms/insights).