About the role:
As Mercury continues its rapid growth trajectory, navigating an increasingly complex regulatory, partner, and product landscape is critical. Compliance is not only a requirement, but a competitive advantage that enables Mercury to move faster, build trust, and launch innovative products responsibly.
Nowhere is that more true than in AI. We believe we have a path to lead the US banking* industry into the AI era, and that how we choose to build and deploy AI will define our success over the next three years.
We are building first-party agentic products, headless and agent-accessible banking through our API and MCP, and the internal platforms that let us build with AI at speed. Core to all of it is great governance—these systems must run on one trusted system of access, logging, and data controls that meets the requirements of our banking ambitions.
We are seeking a Lead Compliance Risk Manager to serve as the compliance advisor for Mercury's AI products. This is a new, high-visibility role and the first dedicated compliance advisory seat covering AI at Mercury. You will be the leading authority on AI product compliance risk for the Compliance Team—shaping how we build, how we govern, and how we explain ourselves to our partners and regulators.
You will partner closely with Product, Engineering, Risk, Data, Legal, and Operations to ensure Mercury's AI products are compliant-by-design from concept through launch and scale. You will also help define the AI governance framework itself: the standards, controls, escalation paths, and documentation that allow a bank-partnered fintech to deploy agentic capabilities responsibly and at pace.
How this role fits alongside our other AI roles: this is a product compliance advisory role. Our Data & AI Governance team owns enterprise governance frameworks, responsible-AI standards, AI use case intake and inventory, and risk classification; Model Risk Management owns model inventory, tiering, and validation. You will be a close partner to and a major consumer of both—running our AI products through their processes, applying their standards to real product decisions, and bringing them the product-level detail they need to see. You will also help extend our existing product compliance playbooks to cover AI features, in partnership with your manager and the rest of the Product Compliance team. Your mandate is the products, not the program.
In this role, you will:
- Serve as the subject matter expert and primary compliance advisor for Mercury's AI and agentic products, including Command, our API, and agentic access methods such as MCP and CLI.
- Work closely with cross-functional risk and product teams to bring Mercury's AI products to market in a way that meets all relevant financial partner, regulatory compliance obligations, and our AI governance standards.
- Ensure all processes and products under your area of responsibility comply with applicable rules and regulations. Stay up to date with changes to applicable regulations, supervisory guidance, and emerging AI-specific law, and implement necessary updates to impacted products to maintain compliance.
- Support expansion for new product launches by scoping, defining, and communicating product and compliance requirements.
- Work cross-functionally to drive remediation efforts for products within your defined scope.
- Support the compliance function in defining and achieving departmental initiatives, maintaining relevant policies and procedures, developing documentation solutions, and liaising with auditors.
- Mentor and provide strategic guidance to compliance colleagues as AI capabilities spread across every product domain, and contribute to building a strong culture of compliance across Mercury.
- Work closely with our Risk team, which owns AI governance, as Compliance’s AI product expert to contribute product-level guidance to ongoing AI governance updates.
Core responsibilities:
- Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Risk, Data, Operations, and Legal to bring Mercury's AI products to market in a manner that meets all relevant regulatory, financial partner, and network obligations.
- Advise product and engineering teams throughout the product lifecycle—discovery, design, evaluation, launch, and iteration—to ensure AI products are compliant-by-design rather than reviewed after the fact.
- Identify, assess, and document compliance risks specific to AI and agentic systems—including inaccurate or fabricated output, unauthorized or over-scoped agent action, inadequate consent and disclosure, unexplainable decisioning, disparate impact, data leakage across customers or organizations, prompt injection and third-party agent risk, and insufficient audit trail—and work cross-functionally to design pragmatic mitigation strategies.
- Define the compliance requirements for the platforms AI is built on, in partnership with the teams that own them: the LLM gateway all internal traffic routes through, the internal app platform, agent orchestration frameworks, and the data access and governance layer.
- Establish and refine AI-specific compliance standards for the department—what evidence a launch requires, what must be logged, what requires human review, what must be escalated, and what is out of bounds—and ensure those standards evolve as the organization and the technology grow.
- Support new product launches and expansions by scoping, defining, and communicating compliance requirements clearly and early, including for co-marketing and distribution partnerships with third-party AI platforms.
- Monitor regulatory, supervisory, and industry developments relevant to AI in financial services, assess impact, and drive implementation of required changes.
- Own and oversee multiple concurrent high-impact AI compliance workstreams, holding project owners accountable for results and ensuring each aligns with department and company objectives.
- Support remediation efforts for products within scope, including root cause analysis, corrective action planning, and execution tracking.
- Partner with executive leadership, partner bank compliance teams, and external advisors to guide high-level decisions on AI direction, presenting data-driven recommendations.
- Contribute to the broader Compliance function by supporting policy development, documentation standards, audit preparation, and examiner interactions.
- Help build and reinforce a strong culture of compliance across Mercury through collaboration, education, and influence—including raising the AI fluency of the Compliance team itself, and developing scalable tools, templates, and frameworks others can reuse.
You should have:
- 8+ years of experience in a compliance advisory, product compliance, or regulatory risk role, ideally within fintech or financial services, with a track record of being the recognized authority in your domain.
- Demonstrated experience advising on AI, machine learning, or model-driven products in a regulated environment—or comparable experience standing up a new compliance domain where no playbook existed.
- Working knowledge of the regulatory and supervisory framework relevant to AI in banking, including UDAAP, fair lending and ECOA/Reg B, FCRA and adverse action, Reg E and payments authorization, BSA/AML, GLBA and privacy, marketing and disclosure requirements, recordkeeping, complaint management, model risk management expectations, and third-party and vendor risk management guidance.
- Familiarity with emerging AI-specific regimes and frameworks and the ability to form a practical view on their application—such as the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, state AI and automated decisioning laws.
- Technical fluency to engage credibly with engineers on model behavior, evaluation and testing, agent permissioning and tool scoping, logging and observability, and data access controls—and to know which questions actually surface risk.
- Deep experience partnering with product and engineering teams on regulatory and compliance matters across the product lifecycle, including on fast-moving launches with external dependencies.
- Proven ability to own highly ambiguous, large-scale compliance problems and to create and execute a strategy to address them, without waiting for precedent.
- Experience designing compliance frameworks that span multiple product lines or departments, and improving systems and processes so that compliance posture evolves alongside business growth.
- Demonstrated success operating with senior stakeholders, including executives, partner banks, auditors, or regulators, and presenting data-driven recommendations that drive decisions.
- Strong project management skills, including the ability to define problems, create execution plans, manage several high-impact initiatives at once, and drive outcomes.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate regulatory and financial partner risk into terms stakeholder teams understand, and to resolve conflict around risk tolerance, resourcing, and timelines.
- Experience mentoring mid-level compliance professionals and raising the capability of a team, not just delivering your own work.
- Comfort operating independently in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment, with sound judgment on when to move and when to escalate.
- Curiosity, adaptability, and genuine interest in engaging with frontier technology and the regulatory challenges that come with it.
*Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.
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.
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Total Rewards
The total rewards package at Mercury includes base salary, equity (stock options/RSUs), 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 in New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, or the San Francisco Bay Area:$207,800—$259,800 USDUS employees outside of New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, or the San Francisco Bay Area: $187,000—$233,800 USDCanadian employees (any location):$196,400—$245,500 CAD