Early Career

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My first job after graduating college was with Provident Funding as a mortgage closer & funder. This was quite an interesting experience. After 2 weeks of training in Burlingame, CA, I headed back to CT and went into the office in New Britain. What I wasn't told, was that the previous employees in that office all quit, and there were weeks of missed closings that I needed to resolve. While I was at provident funding, I was activated from the Marine Corps reserve to support Operation Iraqi Freedom. Upon coming back, I transferred to underwriting. After a year back in the office I was activated again. When I came back the second time I worked for a few more months but then left the company to try mortgage sales. 

I gave sales a try for about 6 months with a small mortgage brokerage company in Worcester, MA. The end result of this experience, is that sales is not my strength. 

In 2006 I joined Countrywide as an Exception Underwriter, reviewing loan escalations to approve exceptions to our policies. I was a bit fortunate as the first hire on this team. I excelled in this role and soon started managing the team. There were a lot of changes happening during this time and my career advanced quickly. It was a bit of a roller coaster, From January 2006 to October of 2009, I went from a new hire exception underwriter, to managing the exception desk, to managing the High Risk Underwriting team, and then managing the Multi-Million Dollar loan underwriting team. I had a team of 12 underwriters reporting to me before I needed to find my next opportunity due to the economic crash in 2008 & 2009. After Bank of America bought out Countrywide, there were a lot of changes made, I was given some notice that we would be closing down the branch and I would be getting laid off. 

Using the connections that I had made while managing the underwriting team, I was able to find my next opportunity. Since I was an escalation point from the standard underwriting branches, I would often provide support in a variety of ways. One thing we would see or get questions on is when the AUS was not delivering results as expected. We had a proprietary Automated Underwriting System called CLUES. My natural inquisitiveness led me to figuring out how to access the xml of the CLUES findings where I was able to more clearly see the input and output of the results. 

With no prior tech experience I would self-triage the issues, such as DTI being calculated incorrectly or conditions firing that shouldn't. I developed a good relationship with the change management team who I would work with to implement these changes as the business SME. So when I was getting laid off I reached out to that team, and they just so happened to have an opening for a Service Delivery Consultant. Although that was the title, it was really more of a business analyst / product owner type of role. I was responsible for identifying solutions to break-fixes, creating the business requirement documents and working with technology partners on implementing these changes using waterfall methodology. 

I excelled in this role and was asked to lead the requirements for an OCC MRA Data Integrity project to fix our data integrity issues. I helped bring our data integrity to within 99% between all of our systems and got the MRA closed. 

After that project, my manager had left the company opening the door for me. I was promoted to manager and began leading a team of business analysts focusing on implementing change for Home Loans, primarily in support of our AUS and product rule engine. 

From 2012 to 2014 my team served as the subject matter experts for the deployment of a new underwriting and fulfillment platform. We helped create the requirements for the new proprietary AUS, Conditions, Data, and overall platform capabilities. I led the UAT for AUS and Condition functionality. I brought together a cross-functional team made up of individuals from multiple teams, to execute over 800 test scripts, testing thousands of use cases. We ensure every potential use case was tested including negative testing. 

After this new platform was released, the maintenance responsibilities of the AUS, conditions, and product rules was shifted to another team. This required that we reinvented ourselves and led us down the path of internal tooling and automation. You can reference those projects here.