Back to jobs

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.

#LI-ES1

Apply for this job

*

indicates a required field

Resume/CV

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Cover Letter

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Upload anything

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Past work, references, side projects, fun facts, recent poetry, etc.

Select...

Please list city and state/province (San Francisco, California, Toronto, Ontario, etc.) 

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Mercury’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

Select...
Select...
Race & Ethnicity Definitions

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

Form CC-305
Page 1 of 1
OMB Control Number 1250-0005
Expires 04/30/2026

Why are you being asked to complete this form?

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years.

Completing this form is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer is confidential. No one who makes hiring decisions will see it. Your decision to complete the form and your answer will not harm you in any way. If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

How do you know if you have a disability?

A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your “major life activities.” If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)
  • Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS
  • Blind or low vision
  • Cancer (past or present)
  • Cardiovascular or heart disease
  • Celiac disease
  • Cerebral palsy
  • Deaf or serious difficulty hearing
  • Diabetes
  • Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders
  • Epilepsy or other seizure disorder
  • Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome
  • Intellectual or developmental disability
  • Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD
  • Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
  • Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports
  • Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)
  • Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities
  • Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)
  • Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema
  • Short stature (dwarfism)
  • Traumatic brain injury
Select...

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.