Senior Model Risk Manager

About Mercury

Mercury is building the financial stack for startups. We’re here to make banking intuitive, powerful, and safe for entrepreneurs and businesses of all sizes. Our team is obsessed with crafting thoughtful tools and protecting the financial ecosystem from fraud, money laundering, sanctions evasion, and other financial crimes. We’re seeking a detail-oriented, technically strong, and collaborative Senior Model Risk Manager to help us level up our defenses while enabling product velocity and innovation.

*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC.

Role Overview

As a Senior Model Risk Manager, you will lead the validation, monitoring, and governance of rule-based detection models, data pipelines, vendor models and ML/AI models and tools. You’ll play a pivotal role in ensuring Mercury’s models are accurate, compliant, and robust, and support the continuous development of our model risk framework in alignment with regulatory expectations. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who understands the nuances of financial crime typologies, risk analytics, and model lifecycle governance. You’ll collaborate closely with model developers, compliance leads, and engineering partners while reporting into the Head of Model Risk Management.

Responsibilities

Model Validation & Performance Oversight

• Perform independent model validation with a focus of AML and sanctions models, including transaction monitoring, customer risk scoring, sanctions screening, related AI tools, etc.
• Assess model methodologies, data integrity, assumptions, implementation, and output reasonableness.
• Evaluate emerging modeling techniques, such as behavioral analytics and machine learning, for suitability in financial crime detection.

Ongoing Monitoring & Model Governance

• Support the establishment and maintenance of monitoring plans for model performance, stability, and concept drift.
• Lead periodic model reviews, recalibrations, and performance assessments in coordination with model owners.
• Track model inventory, issue remediation, and documentation standards under SR 11-7 and internal governance requirements.

Controls & Risk Mitigation

• Recommend risk mitigation strategies for model limitations, including compensating controls, overrides, and thresholds.
• Participate in issue tracking, documentation, and validation of remediation evidence for model validation findings.

Regulatory & Stakeholder Support

• Prepare model validation reports and technical summaries in response to requests from internal audit, executives, bank partners and regulators.
• Partner with compliance and legal teams to ensure model alignment with regulatory standards (e.g., BSA/AML, OFAC, FATF, FinCEN).

Culture Building & Advocacy

• Champion the development of model risk management as a core function within a fast-paced fintech environment.
• Cultivate model risk principles, regulatory expectations, and the value of strong model governance among cross-functional teams including engineering, product, risk, and compliance.

Ad-hoc Analysis & Cross-Functional Support

• Assist with one-off data validation tasks to support timely and accurate compliance reporting to regulators and bank partners.
• Engage in early risk identification efforts and provide MRM advice on the design and governance of new machine learning and AI models under development.
• Flex into broader analytical or compliance-related requests as needed, supporting the evolving needs of a growing MRM function.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering, Finance, or a related field. Master’s degree or PhD is preferred.
• 6–8 years of experience in model risk management, model develo