Strategic Finance - R&D/G&A

About the role

The role serves as the dedicated finance partner to R&D and G&A leadership, owning the financial relationships with Engineering, Product, Design, HR, Legal, and Finance teams. The ideal candidate will understand how headcount plans become roadmaps, how infrastructure costs relate to product bets, and how to bring financial rigor to organizations that don't think in quarters.

Responsibilities

• Be the dedicated finance partner to R&D and G&A leadership. Own the financial relationship with our Engineering, Product, Design, HR, Legal, and Finance teams. Understand their priorities deeply enough to anticipate their questions before they ask them.
• Own headcount and operating expense planning for your orgs. Build and maintain the bottoms-up models that drive our R&D and G&A cost bases—headcount by team, vendor spend, allocated infrastructure costs, and discretionary budgets—and keep them current as plans evolve.
• Support strategic resource allocation decisions. Help R&D leaders think through build vs. buy tradeoffs, team sizing decisions, and investment prioritization. Help G&A leaders evaluate vendor contracts, assess functional scaling ratios, and manage cost efficiency as the company grows.
• Drive the annual planning and ongoing forecasting cycles for your orgs. Translate business priorities into financial plans, own the forecast-to-actuals variance process, and surface insights that help leaders adjust course in real time.
• Bring structure to ambiguous investment questions. Whether it's evaluating a new engineering platform, sizing a legal team for a new product line, or assessing the ROI of a people program, you'll take complex, qualitative problems and return clear financial framing and a point of view.

Requirements

• 3–5 years of experience in investment banking, strategic finance, or consulting—ideally with some exposure to technology companies or organizations where headcount is the primary cost driver.
• A strong financial modeler who can build a clean, flexible headcount or opex model from scratch, and explain it to someone who doesn’t live in spreadsheets. You have good judgment about what level of precision a given decision actually requires—you know when to build the model and when a back-of-envelope answer is better.
• Genuinely curious about how product and engineering organizations work—you want to understand what drives team structure, why infrastructure costs scale the way they do, and what makes a people investment pay off.
• Build trust quickly with non-finance partners. You’re comfortable walking into a room full of engineers or lawyers and asking the questions that get you to the real answer.
• Comfortable pulling and working with data independently—SQL, BI tools, or FP&A platforms—to support your own analysis without relying on a data team.
• Communicate with clarity—you can distill a complex cost driver analysis into a crisp narrative for a leadership team, and you know when to lead with the number and when to lead with the context.

Qualifications

• US employees in New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, or the San Francisco Bay Area: $142,900 - $160,700
• US employees outside of the New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle or the San Francisco Bay Area: $128,600 - $144,600
• Canadian employees (any location): CAD 135,000 - 151,900

Benefits

• The total rewards package at Mercury includes base salary, equity (stock options/RSUs), and benefits.

Pay

• New hire offers are made based on a candidate’s experience, expertise, geographic location, and internal pay equity relative to peers.

Schedule

• 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.