Chief Customer Operations Officer

What is this role about?

Location: remote, frequent travelling to Tallinn, Estonia, during the first 6 months expected.

Bondora is looking for a Chief Customer Operations Officer to join the Management Board and lead the post-origination customer operations and servicing function across Bondora’s European markets.

The role is about building and running scalable, automated, measurable, and controlled operations in a regulated banking environment. The role owns the operational lifecycle after a customer has entered the business.

On the credit side, this includes customer operations, loan management, repayments, collections, recovery, and first-line AML operations within servicing (the credit strategy function owns the economics of credit management decisions). Following receipt of the banking license, the role will also cover the relevant customer operations and self-service processes for retail depositors — excluding ownership of the core deposit product, pricing, treasury, and related monetisation.

That means designing and running the workflows, automation, controls, queues, escalation logic, exception handling, monitoring, and operating cadence required to run high-volume customer and credit operations across countries.

This is a Management Board position with direct accountability for portfolio performance, customer outcomes, operational risk, regulatory resilience, and execution quality across markets.

The function currently manages approximately €550M in performing loans (in addition to non-performing loans), with teams operating across seven countries. The area includes around 60 people, including dedicated product and technology resources, through a matrix structure.

The Chief Customer Operations Officer will be responsible for:

• Customer servicing and customer operations across lending and, after licensing, relevant retail depositor servicing flows
• Loan management, repayments, and borrower servicing
• Early and late-stage collections execution
• Recovery operations, including legal recovery pathways across jurisdictions
• First-line AML operations within customer servicing
• Depositor self-service and customer operations processes after licensing
• Servicing systems, workflow automation, data quality, and process integrity
• Operational risk, process controls, audit remediation, and evidence quality within the function
• Cross-country execution and performance management
• The operating cadence, dashboards, controls, and incident discipline required to run the function reliably at scale

What you will need to build

Bondora needs an operator who can build the operating system, not just inherit one (although 90% of today's work is already automated).

You will be expected to build and run a function where:

• Standard work is automated wherever possible
• Manual work is treated as a problem to solve, not as a permanent staffing need
• Exceptions are routed through clear queues, owners, SLAs, severity levels, and escalation paths
• Operational deviations are detected early and handled like incidents
• Dashboards show process health, backlog, defects, leakage, customer harm, financial impact, and regulatory exposure
• Automation is measured, monitored, controlled, and continuously improved
• Root causes are fixed, not repeatedly worked around
• Product, Data, Engineering, and Operations operate as one execution system

The role requires the ability to decompose operations into customer journeys, subprocesses, states, queues, handoffs, ownership, controls, exceptions, and failure modes.

You need to be comfortable moving from Management Board accountability to detailed process inspection.

Key responsibilities

The Chief Customer Operations Officer will be responsible for: 

• Translating approved credit and customer strategies into automated, measurable, and controlled execution
• Designing and improving workflows, customer journeys, subprocesses, states, queues, ownership, handoffs, SLAs, severity levels, and escalation logic
• Building the control system for automated operations, including monitoring, alerts, QA, sampling, audit trails, reconciliation, defect tracking, and process health dashboards
• Ensuring the cases automation cannot handle are routed to the right owner with the right information, SLA, severity, and escalation path
• Running operational deviations as incidents: detect, triage, contain, fix, communicate, and prevent recurrence
• Identifying manual work that should not exist and removing it through automation, simplification, policy change, tooling change, or process redesign
• Prioritising operational improvements by customer harm, financial impact, regulatory risk, operational volume, and reversibility
• Strengthening process controls, audit evidence, data quality, and system integrity across servicing, repayment allocation, customer communications, registry reporting, depositor servicing flows, and first-line AML execution
• Leading cross-functional execution with Product, Engineering, Data, Risk, Legal, Compliance, and country teams
• Building the operating cadence: daily and weekly performance reviews, incident reviews, control reviews, automation roadmap, RCA discipline, and clear ownership
• Ensuring the function can scale without simply adding manual work, headcount, and management layers

Candidate profile

The right candidate is a highly detailed, quantitative, and hands-on operations leader with senior experience in regulated financial services as a plus (but not as a hard requirement). 

Strong candidates may come from digital banking and lending, debt recovery, scaled consumer operations (e.g., marketplaces), or regulated high-volume customer operations.

This role does not own the economic optimization of credit decisions. However, the candidate must understand economics well enough to prioritise operational leakage, customer harm, regulatory risk, process improvement, and automation opportunities.

The ideal candidate has built or materially transformed high-volume operations using automation, workflow design, process controls, measurement, and disciplined execution.

They should have experience with real production automation, including AI or agentic automation where relevant, not only pilots, proofs of concept, vendor demos, or consultant-led transformation programmes.

Leadership style

This role requires a direct, highly quantitative, hands-on operator.

The successful candidate must be close enough to the detail to identify weak execution, system defects, broken ownership, control gaps, and automation failures. They must also be senior enough to build the operating model, team structure, hiring plan, and decision discipline required for scale.

They should be control-conscious without being bureaucratic, commercially aware without ignoring customer or regulatory consequences, and practical enough to fix problems rather than only describe them.

As a Management Board member, they must be able to take formal accountability, clearly escalate material risks, and ensure the function can withstand regulatory, audit, customer, and financial scrutiny.

Why the role matters

Bondora’s customer relationship does not end when a loan is issued or a deposit account is opened. A large part of value, trust, and risk management is determined by what happens afterward.

This role owns the operating engine.

The goal is to build servicing, collections, recovery, depositor operations, and control capabilities that can support a larger, more complex, regulated, multi-country banking business without simply adding manual work and management layers.

What can you expect at Bondora? 

• Contribute to Bondora’s ambitious goal of reaching 1BN in revenue. Your skills and efforts will directly impact our growth trajectory and shape the future of our company.
• Our employees deserve the best. We recognize our people with a competitive salary and a generous benefits package (5 weeks of vacation, private healthcare compensation, hobby grant, mental healthcare support, share options and much more!)
• We provide an environment that encourages your personal and professional growth. As we constantly evolve and innovate, you’ll have endless opportunities (and budget) to expand your skills and skyrocket your career.

The next steps

If you have the guts, ideas, and a team vision, apply now! 

Our hiring process: 

• Meet Kerli, our Talent Acquisition Partner
• Home Assessments
• Collaborate with Pärtel, our CEO and Founder.
• Engage with key stakeholders.
• The celebration begins: If the stars align, receive an offer to join the Bondora team!