About Accion:

Accion is a global nonprofit on a mission to create a fair and inclusive economy for the 1.6 billion people who are failed by the global financial system. We develop and scale responsible digital financial solutions for small business owners, smallholder farmers, and women, so they can make informed decisions and improve their lives. Through targeted investment strategies, advisory solutions, and expert thought leadership, we work with local partners to develop and scale cheaper, more accessible, and customer-friendly financial solutions. Since 1961, Accion has helped build 299 financial service providers serving low-income clients in 77 countries, reaching over 500 million people. More at https://www.accion.org.

About Accion Advisory:

We are a diverse, close-knit global team with a common social purpose: building a financially inclusive world for small businesses and low-income households.  The Advisory team is composed of deep technical experts who are passionate about working with a wide range of financial service providers, digital platform providers, FinTech's, and others across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to build sustainable businesses to achieve financial inclusion.

Combining cutting-edge innovation and a deep understanding of client needs, Accion’s Advisory team offers our partners and the industry unique and strategic insights, as well as operational expertise, grounded in decades of hands-on support to leading financial service providers (FSPs). Accion Advisory leverages innovations in financial services to lower costs and improve quality at scale, helping build sustainable, scalable institutions focused on serving the financial needs of underserved individuals and micro and small businesses (MSEs). Bringing customer-centric, data-driven, tech-enabled solutions and tools, Accion Advisory delivers support to FSPs and other value-added service providers to MSEs.  We provide strategic and operational support to enhance our partners' capabilities and maximize their impact on underserved populations. We connect local ecosystem actors, harnessing philanthropic capital, digital public infrastructure, and the latest technologies to test, improve, and scale responsible financial solutions that enable small business owners and their families to improve their economic well-being.

Project Summary:

The Conversational AI Credit Agent Lead is a senior consulting role within Accion's Advisory work in Brazil, providing specialized expertise in engineering leadership. The role owns the design, build, and iterative delivery of WhatsApp-native AI credit agents that manage the full process for MSE credit - from proactive merchant credit offers through to collections. The consultant will directly contribute to specification and production, strategically embedding with partner product and engineering teams to deliver high-quality outputs within project timelines.

The ideal candidate will have proven expertise in delivering agentic workflows within financial services and show a strong awareness of how to embed responsible practices within conversational interfaces to ensure consumer protection.

Location: Brazil

Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end architectural design and specification of WhatsApp enabled conversational AI agents, establishing technical foundation and requirements within the context of Accion Advisory’s partner interventions.
• Understand operational financial services workflows within which Agents can embed to add value and efficiency – prioritize use cases for agentic interventions.
• Contribute to production alongside 3rd party development teams.
• Ensure agents correctly interpret MSE customer intention - accommodating colloquial Brazilian Portuguese.
• Manage agent engineering sprint cadence as a consultant, collaborating closely with client product Managers and Accion teams to drive project objectives.
• Deliver project milestones and key deliverables, providing transparent progress reporting to project leads and stakeholders.
• Ensure portability of the agent to adjacent use cases where appropriate

Qualifications

• Experience in credit risk management, consulting, or other relevant subject matter area.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English and Portuguese.

• Experience with WhatsApp Business API as a deployment channel.

• Strong command of Natural Language Understanding pipeline design: intent classification, entity extraction, dialogue state management, and context persistence across multi-turn sessions.

• Experience integrating Large Language Models (GPT-4, Claude or Gemini) into production workflows, including prompt engineering, output validation, and latency management.

• Proficiency in Python; experience with agent backend services.

• Prior experience building conversational AI for a financial services workflow - credit, collections, payments, or insurance - at production scale. Candidates with chatbot experience in retail or e-commerce only will require a strong compensating factor.

• Familiarity with the regulatory and UX constraints of deploying financial AI agents in an emerging market context, particularly around plain-language explanation of credit decisions

• Proven consulting experience delivering complex AI engineering workstreams in agile, multi-stakeholder environments with external partners and shared codebases.

• Experience defining sprint plans, acceptance criteria, and phase gate deliverables - not only building but structuring the work.

• Interested in our mission and working globally.

• Willingness to embody our values of excellence, respect and passion for social change.
• Excellence: Accion staff should always put forth their best effort in all activities, strive for high quality of collective and individual performance; and demonstrate honesty and integrity at all times while in the workplace and while working on behalf of the organization.
• Respect: Accion staff should value one another’s roles and responsibilities as much as their own, be encouraging, and value the diverse and unique perspectives of colleagues. They should honor obligations and commitments to each other and to external partners.
• Passion for Social Change: Accion staff should be committed to making a difference in the lives of those less fortunate, value the greater good of the organization over personal gain, and promote a productive workplace by acknowledging the accomplishments of others.

Travel Requirements

• Travel up to 30% domestically and occasional international trips.

Accion is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace culture. Accion seeks qualified applicants without regard to race, color, gender, sex, age, religion, creed, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, marital status, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, medical condition, military and veteran status, gender identity or expression, genetic information, change of sex or transgender status, or any other basis protected by law. Accion is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.