Underwriting & Funding Manager

About the role

inKind is looking for an Underwriting & Funding Manager to evaluate restaurant funding opportunities and make disciplined, timely funding decisions. You’ll own the review process from initial diligence through final recommendation or approval, helping inKind fund strong restaurant partners while managing risk.

This role requires financial judgment, attention to detail, and the ability to understand the business behind the numbers. You should be comfortable making decisions with incomplete information, asking thoughtful questions, and explaining your conclusions clearly.

What you’ll do

• Review new funding opportunities. Assess applications, financial statements, sales trends, bank activity, existing obligations, and other supporting materials for completeness and accuracy.
• Underwrite restaurant businesses. Evaluate operating performance, cash flow, liquidity, ownership experience, and the restaurant’s ability to support the proposed funding structure.
• Determine appropriate funding terms. Recommend funding amounts, structures, conditions, and risk mitigants based on your analysis and inKind’s underwriting guidelines.
• Make funding decisions. Approve or decline requests within your delegated authority and present exceptions or larger transactions to the appropriate decision-makers.
• Document your judgment. Prepare concise underwriting summaries that explain the opportunity, key risks, assumptions, and rationale for each decision.
• Lead diligence. Work with restaurant owners and internal teams to resolve questions, verify information, and identify material discrepancies or potential fraud.
• Coordinate funding readiness. Confirm that required approvals, documentation, and funding conditions are complete before funds are released.
• Improve the process. Help refine underwriting standards, approval workflows, and reporting to make decisions more consistent and efficient.
• Learn from performance. Partner with the team monitoring funded restaurants to compare actual results with underwriting assumptions and improve future decisions.

Minimum Experience

• 4+ years of experience in commercial underwriting, small business financing, fintech lending, credit analysis, investment analysis, or a related field.
• Strong financial statement analysis and modeling skills, including the ability to evaluate cash flow, liquidity, leverage, repayment capacity, and unit-level economics.
• Experience independently evaluating transactions, assessing financial and operational risks, and making or recommending funding decisions.
• Experience building, implementing, or improving underwriting processes, with a focus on automation, operational efficiency, and scalable decision-making.
• Ability to translate underwriting policies, financial thresholds, risk indicators, and approval requirements into structured business rules and automated workflows.
• Strong analytical and technical aptitude, with the ability to work with financial datasets, identify patterns, validate information, and support data-driven underwriting decisions.
• Strong Excel or Google Sheets skills, including financial modeling, scenario analysis, and working with transaction-level data.
• Familiarity with underwriting systems, financial data platforms, automated decisioning tools, or workflow automation technologies.
• Ability to partner effectively with Product, Engineering, and Data teams to define requirements, test solutions, and implement improvements to underwriting systems and processes.
• Sound commercial judgment and the ability to balance funding opportunities, speed of execution, and disciplined risk management.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex financial findings, underwriting decisions, and technical requirements to financial and nonfinancial stakeholders.
• Strong organization, attention to detail, and follow-through, with the ability to manage multiple funding reviews and process improvement initiatives without sacrificing quality.

Preferred Experience

• Restaurant, hospitality, or multiunit business underwriting experience.
• Familiarity with restaurant point-of-sale (POS) data, payment processing systems, seasonality, food and labor costs, and location-level profitability.
• Experience with alternative financing structures, including revenue-based financing or merchant cash advances.
• Hands-on experience implementing automated underwriting workflows, rules-based decision engines, risk-scoring models, or automated approval processes.
• Experience integrating or analyzing financial data from banking platforms, POS systems, payment processors, or third-party data providers.
• Working knowledge of SQL and experience with Snowflake, Sigma, Tableau, or similar data and business intelligence platforms.
• Experience using AI, machine learning, or automation tools to improve financial analysis, document processing, risk assessment, or underwriting efficiency.
• A track record of building or refining underwriting policies, approval frameworks, and risk management processes in a high-growth fintech or lending environment.

What success looks like

You deliver timely, well-supported funding decisions; identify material risks before funding; maintain clear and complete approval records; and help inKind grow a healthy portfolio of restaurant partners.

Compensation and benefits: $120,000 - 155,000 base salary + Benefits