Risk Design Lead

In 1954, Eero Saarinen designed a branch office with glass walls, no offices, and a completely open floor plan in Columbus, Indiana. It was surrounded by trees; the furniture was made by Herman Miller; the lobby flooring was thick, rustic brick. It was built with transparency and community at its core. 

Since then, a lot of things have happened—Saarinen’s branch is now a conference center, people increasingly live on the internet, and it’s hard to think of a single financial institution that still applies design thinking to their company.

Mercury is on a mission to defy those expectations. We’re a financial technology company that helps startups spend less time banking and more time building. We believe that the key to our success revolves around thoughtful design and we’re looking to add a design lead to our Risk Organization, to define product strategy for the org, support two designers on that team, help the team grow, and own design work whenever needed. You’ll be a key part of a team whose work is massively impactful to both our external customers and internal teams. 

Our design team consists of 30+ people who love to solve complex problems through design, but are equally passionate about cultivating, guiding, and inspiring each other through their work to foster a collaborative environment of experimentation and innovation.

In this role, you’ll:

• Understand our product, business, brand, and processes inside and out. Once you know how it all works, you’ll help us come up with ways to improve.
• Deeply understand the Risk Product space, work with the exec team and cross-functional partners to come up with the strategy for the team. Set up product teams for success in reaching those goals. 
• Know your team and help them grow. Use 1:1s to provide coaching and mentorship, come up with structures to help prioritize work, and make sure every person on your team thrives.
• Make your team feel like a Team. Plan team trips, organize working sessions, share inspo, and encourage collaborative projects that make our remote, distributed group feel less remote and distributed.
• Document and evangelize what works (design systems, team meetings, internal processes), and ditch what doesn’t.
• Create an environment where people feel comfortable pushing back on work that doesn’t hit the mark, and model radical candor with feedback that’s provocative rather than prescriptive.
• Help us hire more great people.

There are a lot of paths that could lead you to a role like this, so we encourage you to apply even if you’re not sure. Some relevant skills that can help:

• You’re good at wrangling ambiguity and finding ways to improve the world around you, even when nobody’s told you to do so.
• You’ve worked in Fintech on Risk-related projects, or in other highly regulated industries such as healthcare. 
• You can tell when you’ve hit on the right amount of process/structure without it feeling stifling or unnecessary.
• You’ve led a design team of any size for over a year or provided mentorship long-term to designers, coached them, and helped them grow in their skills.
• You keep up on design trends and like to stay in practice, even if it’s been awhile since you were an individual contributor. You can jump into work whenever needed and you can be a highly productive individual contributor. 
• You can tell when something’s good and articulate clearly (and kindly) when it’s not.
• You can drive design team processes such as design critiques, and are able to guide the team to ask the right questions to elevate the quality of the user experience. 

The total rewards package at Mercury includes base salary, equity (stock options), 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.

Our target new hire base salary ranges for this role are the following:

US employees (any location): $180,000-211,000

Canadian employees (any location): CAD 164,000-193,000

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