Staff Software Engineer

About the role

You will architect and implement the core systems that power Mercury's Risk product, guiding business applications through intelligent automation from submission to approval. You will own the end-to-end delivery of high-impact projects, translating ambiguous requirements into clear strategy and measurable outcomes. Your work will enable real-time fraud prevention and decisioning, ensuring every business onboarding feels effortless and secure. You will partner with Data Science and ML teams to productionize models and build reliable data pipelines for model serving. You will establish engineering best practices, mentor engineers, and act as a trusted advisor on architectural tradeoffs across the organization. You will navigate complex stakeholder environments, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and independently resolve cross-team issues. The result is a quiet brilliance where billions of data points converge into a single, delightful experience for founders launching their companies.

Key facts

What you'll do

Lead the architecture, implementation, and long-term roadmap for core systems which support multiple fraud prevention use cases.

Own the end-to-end delivery of large cross-function projects, translating ambiguous high impact problems into strategy and execution, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and drive teams to measurable outcomes.

Design, build, and operate highly available, low-latency, backend systems that enable real-time scoring and decisioning for fraud prevention.

Partner with Data Science and ML teams to productionize models, build reliable ML data pipelines, and enable real-time model serving.

Establish and elevate department level best practices, review designs, drive engineering quality, and act as a trusted advisor on architectural tradeoffs.

Mentor and grow engineers, documenting learnings and sharing technical direction through writing, 1:1s, and team meetings.

Navigate and influence multiple stakeholders, help align teams, communicate tradeoffs to technical and non-technical partners, and independently resolve cross team issues.

Invest in automation and tooling to improve developer velocity, reliability, and operational excellence across risk and decisioning systems.

Collaborate closely with product managers to ensure technical solutions align with user needs, regulatory requirements, and business goals.

Contribute to incident response and postmortems, driving improvements in system resilience and observability.

Evaluate emerging technologies and assess their applicability to risk, fraud, and compliance problems at scale.

Support the definition and tracking of key performance indicators to measure the success of risk systems and user outcomes.

Work within a regulated environment, ensuring solutions meet auditability, explainability, and compliance standards.

Champion code quality, testing, and documentation to maintain a sustainable, long-lived codebase.

Requirements

Has 7-10+ years of software development experience, with a strong focus on the backend, with a knowledge of or excitement to learn Haskell.

Has been an experienced technical lead making architectural decisions in the past and seen the impact of those decisions over time. You should be able to clearly articulate your technical opinions and lay out tradeoffs.

Is passionately product-minded and has experience building and shipping new products balancing reliability and velocity.

Is someone comfortable driving discussions in areas with ambiguous ownership, approaches them with empathy, and delights in getting outcomes. Our work touches many other teams and areas of the product; you'll have a lot of autonomy and the expectation is you'll use that to seek out ways to have an impact.

Is ridiculously helpful, taking initiative to make your coworkers' lives easier by investing time to mentor and proactively share your knowledge and learnings through writings, 1:1s, and team meetings.

Experience in fintech, fraud systems, or the broader risk domain is a strong plus.

Demonstrates strong ownership, bias for action, and the ability to operate effectively in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.

Communicates clearly and persuasively, both in writing and verbally, to diverse audiences at all levels of the organization.

Proficient in designing, building, and operating scalable, reliable backend services with strong observability and monitoring.

Comfortable making technical decisions in the context of regulatory constraints and compliance considerations.