Senior Software Engineer - Risk (AI & Automation)

Mercury is a fintech company dedicated to providing banking services to ambitious founders and businesses. Through strategic partnerships, Mercury delivers FDIC-insured banking, focusing on creating seamless and efficient experiences for its clients. The company is committed to innovation, leveraging advanced technologies like AI to enhance its offerings and maintain a high standard of operational excellence.

Introduction

Every new customer applying for a Mercury bank* account initiates a complex process involving identity and business verification, ownership checks, sanctions screening, and fraud detection. The Risk Engineering team at Mercury is responsible for navigating this intricate landscape, enabling thousands of ambitious individuals to safely leverage Mercury's banking services daily. We operate with speed and precision, making confident decisions that protect the system without hindering innovation. Our goal is to ensure founders can open bank accounts in minutes, oblivious to the underlying complexity.

We are now entering a new phase, building agentic AI systems that not only score risk but also reason about it. These systems will investigate, decide, escalate, and learn, powering and automating KYC Refresh, EDD, ODD, and compliance workflows. This will significantly enhance efficiency and scalability, reducing manual effort, enabling earlier risk detection, and leading to sharper decisions and a seamless user experience.

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer passionate about bringing intelligent automation to life in production systems. You will design and build AI-driven workflows capable of multi-step reasoning, adapting to new information, and orchestrating complex decisions across various teams, models, and services. If you view compliance as a fascinating systems challenge at a global scale and are excited to build agentic AI that protects millions of dollars and empowers founders worldwide, we encourage you to apply.

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

Responsibilities

• Drive AI Product Development in Risk: Shape the architecture and implementation of AI-powered risk systems, from application approvals to ongoing and enhanced due diligence, translating ambiguous signals into clear outcomes.
• Collaborate Across Functions: Partner with Product, Design, Risk Strategy, Compliance, and Operations to convert evolving regulatory and operational needs into elegant, resilient software, pushing the boundaries of what's possible with modern AI and thoughtfully designed systems.
• Lead Projects End-to-End: Drive technical projects from concept to production across the stack, defining solutions, analyzing tradeoffs, making critical decisions, and delivering sustainable software.
• Craftsmanship: Write clear, testable, and maintainable code, establishing patterns and best practices for the team to ensure 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 ensure work quality through post-launch monitoring.
• Operational Excellence: Foster a strong culture of operational excellence, maintaining high standards for observability, reliability, and incident response.
• Think Product, Not Just Code: Approach problems with a product mindset, valuing the business impact of your work as much as the technical design.
• Mentor & Elevate: Coach engineers on your team by sharing patterns, practices, and critical thinking to raise technical standards and cultivate a culture of sustainable engineering.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, preferably in Payments or Risk.
• Agentic AI expertise: proven experience building and launching applied Agentic AI products with strong business impact, scaling them from 0→1 to 1→10 in production environments.
• Demonstrated success building large-scale distributed systems, ideally involving third-party integrations and decision automation.
• A mindset that balances urgency with craftsmanship: shipping fast without compromising engineering quality.
• A track record of elevating quality and operational excellence, balancing shipping speed with technical excellence and observability.
• Creativity and adaptability: ability to think innovatively and find solutions that advance both product and business goals.
• Strong communication and leadership skills: capable of inspiring engineers and articulating tradeoffs to influence cross-team decisions.
• Experience with or curiosity about KYC, AML, risk, or compliance systems in financial services or fintech.

About Company

Mercury is a fintech company dedicated to providing banking services to ambitious founders and businesses. Through strategic partnerships, Mercury delivers FDIC-insured banking, focusing on creating seamless and efficient experiences for its clients. The company is committed to innovation, leveraging advanced technologies like AI to enhance its offerings and maintain a high standard of operational excellence.

How to Apply

If this role interests you, we invite you to explore our public demo at demo.mercury.com. To apply, please use the provided application link.