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Head of Engineering - Risk

San Francisco, CA, New York, NY, Portland, OR, or Remote within Canada or United States

2500 years ago, the Cyclopean walls of Rajgir encircled the first capital of the Magadha kingdom in India, protecting it from invasions while preserving vital trade routes and cultural hubs. Their strategic gates and pathways enabled commerce and daily life to thrive even during conflict. These walls supported Magadha’s rise, facilitating trade, governance, and cultural exchange while safeguarding its people—a foundation for the kingdom’s prosperity and resilience.

The Risk function at Mercury plays a similar dual role: safeguarding our customers while enabling responsible and compliant expansion of our financial platform.

As the Head of Risk Engineering, you will lead a group of engineers and managers dedicated to designing, developing, and scaling systems that underpin Mercury’s approach to fraud detection and regulatory compliance. You’ll work cross-functionally with product managers, designers, data scientists, compliance officers, and other product teams to ensure that Mercury’s risk systems are robust and adaptable to evolving challenges. Mercury stands out by embedding user experience at the heart of its products, ensuring risk systems are as intuitive as they are functional.

Mercury is at a pivotal moment of growth, and we need a leader who can blend strategic vision with technical expertise, capable of building and leading a world-class risk engineering team that keeps us safe as we scale.

In this role, you will

  • Define and execute a risk engineering strategy: develop plans that align with Mercury’s long-term vision to ensure that our approach to risk supports rapid and compliant growth.
  • Lead a team of talented managers and engineers: foster a culture of excellence, innovation, user-centric design, and collaboration in our engineering team.
  • Build and scale risk infrastructure: architect and scale foundational risk systems to support real-time decision-making, effective data management, and advanced fraud prevention.
  • Develop self-service tools for internal teams: empower product, compliance, and risk operations teams with extensive and user-friendly risk tooling, enabling independent monitoring and management of risk processes and reducing dependencies for day-to-day operations.
  • Support compliance and regulatory standards: collaborate with legal and compliance experts to keep Mercury a compliance leader in an evolving regulatory climate.
  • Champion data-driven risk management: lead initiatives to leverage data and machine learning in fraud detection and compliance, providing Mercury with actionable insights and automated solutions that improve our resilience.

What you bring

  • Proven leadership in engineering: 10+ years of engineering experience with at least 2 years in a senior leadership role (e.g., head, director, or senior manager), ideally within fintech or regulated technology environments.
  • Risk and compliance expertise: deep experience in fraud prevention and compliance (KYC/KYB, AML), ideally within the financial services industry.
  • Technical proficiency: knowledge of backend systems, and risk-related technologies (e.g., machine learning for fraud detection). Familiarity with Mercury’s stack (Haskell, TypeScript, React) is a plus.
  • Customer-centric approach: heavy focus on understanding users and developing strong and well-informed opinions on the product.
  • Data-driven mindset: skilled at leveraging data and analytics to inform risk strategies, with a strong understanding of the role data systems play in decision-making and real-time risk management.
  • Strong cross-functional collaboration skills: ability to work closely with diverse teams, including product, compliance, and design, to develop holistic risk solutions that enhance security while preserving user experience.
  • Adaptability and innovation: ability to navigate and lead in a fast-paced, dynamic environment. Skilled in designing systems that are both secure and flexible that evolve with the company’s growth.

Why join us?

Mercury is redefining banking* for startups, combining a deep understanding of customer needs with cutting-edge technology. As the Head of Risk Engineering, you’ll have the opportunity to shape the future of risk at Mercury, leading a mission-critical team and building scalable, impactful solutions that enable safe, seamless growth. You’ll join an organization that values integrity, innovation, and an unwavering commitment to excellence.

The total rewards package at Mercury includes base salary, equity (stock options), and benefits. Our salary and equity ranges are highly competitive within the SaaS and fintech industry and are updated regularly using the most reliable compensation survey data for our industry. New hire offers are made based on a candidate’s experience, expertise, geographic location, and internal pay equity relative to peers.

Our target new hire base salary ranges for this role are the following:

  • US employees (any location): $278,000 - 327,000 USD
  • Canadian employees (any location): CAD 253,000 - 297,600

We use Covey as part of our hiring and / or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT. As part of the evaluation process we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound on January 22, 2024. Please see the independent bias audit report covering our use of Covey here.

*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

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