Senior Software Engineer - Risk (AI & Automation)

Every new customer who applies for a Mercury bank* account is like a new star igniting in the night sky. At first glance, it’s a single spark. But look closer, and a constellation emerges—identity and business verification, ownership and control checks, sanctions and adverse media screening, and fraud signals—all pulling on one another with invisible gravity.

The Risk Engineering team is the navigation system for this universe.

Our job is to guide thousands of ambitious people safely through Mercury’s orbit every day—each with its own trajectory, risk profile, and story. We operate at escape velocity: moving fast, making confident decisions, and protecting the system without slowing down the builders who rely on us. When we do our work well, founders open bank accounts in delightful minutes, not days—and never have to think about the complexity humming beneath the surface.

Now we’re entering a new era. We’re building agentic AI systems that don’t just score risk, but reason about it—systems that can investigate, decide, escalate, and learn. These agents will help power and automate our KYC Refresh, EDD, ODD, and compliance workflows, taking our operations to the next level of efficiency and scale. The goal: less manual toil, earlier risk detection, sharper decisions, and experiences that feel almost magical in their simplicity.

This is where you come in.

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer who is energized by the idea of bringing intelligent automation to life in real production systems. Someone who wants to design and build AI-driven workflows that can think in steps, adapt to new information, and orchestrate complex decisions across people, models, and services. Someone who sees compliance not as red tape, but as a fascinating systems problem at planetary scale.

If you’re excited to build agentic AI that matters—software that protects millions of dollars, unlocks opportunities for founders around the world, and helps shape the future of banking—we’d love to explore the universe together.

*​​Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.

In this role, you will:

• Drive AI Product Development in Risk: You’ll help shape the architecture and implementation of AI-powered risk systems—from application approvals to ongoing and enhanced due diligence—turning messy, ambiguous signals into clear outcomes. 
• Collaborate Across Functions: You’ll partner with Product, Design, Risk Strategy, Compliance, and Operations to translate evolving regulatory and operational needs into elegant, resilient software. And you’ll push the frontier of what’s possible when modern AI meets thoughtfully designed systems.
• Lead Projects End-to-End: Drive technical projects from concept to production across the stack. Define solutions, analyze tradeoffs, make critical decisions, and deliver software that works today and is sustainable for tomorrow.
• Craftsmanship: Write clear, testable, and maintainable code. Establish patterns and best practices that your team can follow, ensuring long-term scalability and reliability.
• Drive Quality & Scalability: Design extensible platform systems that create leverage, make balanced decisions on tech debt, plan careful rollouts, and own the quality of your work through post-launch monitoring. 
• Operational Excellence: Model a strong culture of operational excellence, holding a high bar for observability, reliability, and incident response.
• Think Product, Not Just Code: Approach problems with a product mindset. You care as much about the business impact of what you build as the technical design.
• Mentor & Elevate: Coach engineers on your team by sharing patterns, practices, and critical thinking to raise the technical bar and foster a culture of sustainable engineering.

You should have:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, preferably in Payments or Risk.
• Agentic AI expertise—you’ve built and launched applied Agentic AI products that have had strong business impact, shipping them from 0→1 and scaling 1→10 in production environments.
• Proven success building large-scale distributed systems, ideally involving 3rd party integrations and decision automation.
• A mindset that balances urgency with craftsmanship: shipping fast, without cutting corners on quality engineering.
• A track record of raising the bar for quality and operational excellence, balancing shipping speed with technical excellence and observability.
• A mindset that balances urgency with craftsmanship: shipping fast, without cutting corners on quality engineering.
• Creativity and adaptability — you think beyond the obvious and find solutions that move both product and business forward.
• Strong communication and leadership skills—you can inspire other engineers and articulate tradeoffs to influence decisions across teams.
• Experience with or curiosity about KYC, AML, risk, or compliance systems in financial services or fintech.

If this role interests you, we invite you to explore our public demo at demo.mercury.com. 

The total rewards package at Mercury includes base salary, equity, 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: $200,700 - $250,900
• Canadian employees: CAD $189,700 - $237,100

Mercury values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Mercury are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities or special needs. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.

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 for more information.] 

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