Payment Operations Lead

About the role

Mercury is building a complete finance stack for startups, creating the easiest and safest banking experience possible. Underneath that experience is a network of payment rails, bank partners, operational desks, controls, exceptions, and workflows that keep customer funds moving safely and reliably. These rails include international wires, domestic wires, RTP, ACH, and checks.

We’re looking for a Payment Operations Lead to help build and scale the operational desks that support Mercury Bank’s payment rails. You’ll bring deep payments knowledge, strong team leadership, and a systems-minded approach to making operational work more efficient through process design, tooling, automation, and AI. This is a high-trust role for someone who understands both the precision and pace required in payment operations.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a Payment Operations team responsible for supporting Mercury Bank’s payment rails, ensuring the team has clear priorities, strong operating standards, and the coaching needed to do excellent work.
• Build and scale payment operations desks across international wires, domestic wires, RTP, ACH, and checks, including the workflows, escalation paths, controls, documentation, and quality standards needed to support reliable money movement at increasing volume.
• Bring deep payments expertise to operational decision-making, helping the team navigate exceptions, investigations, returns, rejects, recalls, partner requirements, and the tradeoffs that come with moving money in a regulated environment.
• Improve operational efficiency through better processes, tooling, automation, AI-enabled workflows, dashboards, and measurement systems that reduce manual effort while preserving judgment and control.
• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Compliance, Risk, Banking Partnerships, and other Operations teams to identify bottlenecks, improve workflows, and ensure payment operations are built for scale.
• Define and track the metrics that matter for payment operations, including productivity, quality, SLA adherence, exception trends, control health, payment rail performance, and customer or partner impact.
• Create a culture of ownership, urgency, and high quality, where the team understands not just what needs to happen, but why it matters for customers, partners, and Mercury.

Requirements

• Have 3-5+ years of experience in payments, banking operations, payment operations, business operations, or a related operational function, ideally in a financial institution, bank, fintech, or regulated technology company.
• Bring deep working knowledge of payment rails such as international wires, domestic wires, RTP, ACH, and checks, including money movement operations, payment exceptions, operational risk, controls, and the systems that support reliable payment processing.
• Have experience leading, coaching, or managing an operations team, with a track record of setting clear expectations, improving performance, and building strong team operating rhythms.
• Be excited to make operations more scalable through process improvement, tooling, automation, AI, documentation, dashboards, and thoughtful measurement.
• Understand how to operate in a regulated environment, including how to balance speed, customer experience, risk, compliance, and operational quality.
• Communicate clearly and calmly, especially when work is complex, cross-functional, urgent, or sensitive.
• Have a high degree of ownership. You notice where the system is fragile, unclear, or too manual, and you take responsibility for making it better.
• Be comfortable working cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Compliance, Risk, Banking Partnerships, and other teams to turn operational realities into better systems.

Pay

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: $135,000—$168,700 USD
• US employees outside of New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, or the San Francisco Bay Area: $121,500—$151,800 USD
• Canadian employees (any location): $127,600—$159,400 CAD

Total rewards include 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.