Lead Compliance Risk Manager, Product Compliance - AI

About the role: As Mercury continues its rapid growth trajectory, navigating an increasingly complex regulatory, partner, and product landscape is critical. Compliance is not only a requirement, but a competitive advantage that enables Mercury to move faster, build trust, and launch innovative products responsibly. Nowhere is that more true than in AI. We believe we have a path to lead the US banking* industry into the AI era, and that how we choose to build and deploy AI will define our success over the next three years. We are building first-party agentic products, headless and agent-accessible banking through our API and MCP, and the internal platforms that let us build with AI at speed. Core to all of it is great governance—these systems must run on one trusted system of access, logging, and data controls that meets the requirements of our banking ambitions. We are seeking a Lead Compliance Risk Manager to serve as the compliance advisor for Mercury's AI products. This is a new, high-visibility role and the first dedicated compliance advisory seat covering AI at Mercury. You will be the leading authority on AI product compliance risk for the Compliance Team—shaping how we build, how we govern, and how we explain ourselves to our partners and regulators. You will partner closely with Product, Engineering, Risk, Data, Legal, and Operations to ensure Mercury's AI products are compliant-by-design from concept through launch and scale. You will also help define the AI governance framework itself: the standards, controls, escalation paths, and documentation that allow a bank-partnered fintech to deploy agentic capabilities responsibly and at pace. How this role fits alongside our other AI roles: this is a product compliance advisory role. Our Data & AI Governance team owns enterprise governance frameworks, responsible-AI standards, AI use case intake and inventory, and risk classification; Model Risk Management owns model inventory, tiering, and validation. You will be a close partner to and a major consumer of both—running our AI products through their processes, applying their standards to real product decisions, and bringing them the product-level detail they need to see. You will also help extend our existing product compliance playbooks to cover AI features, in partnership with your manager and the rest of the Product Compliance team. Your mandate is the products, not the program. In this role, you will: • Serve as the subject matter expert and primary compliance advisor for Mercury's AI and agentic products, including Command, our API, and agentic access methods such as MCP and CLI. • Work closely with cross-functional risk and product teams to bring Mercury's AI products to market in a way that meets all relevant financial partner, regulatory compliance obligations, and our AI governance standards. • Ensure all processes and products under your area of responsibility comply with applicable rules and regulations. Stay up to date with changes to applicable regulations, supervisory guidance, and emerging AI-specific law, and implement necessary updates to impacted products to maintain compliance. • Support expansion for new product launches by scoping, defining, and communicating product and compliance requirements. • Work cross-functionally to drive remediation efforts for products within your defined scope. • Support the compliance function in defining and achieving departmental initiatives, maintaining relevant policies and procedures, developing documentation solutions, and liaising with auditors. • Mentor and provide strategic guidance to compliance colleagues as AI capabilities spread across every product domain, and contribute to building a strong culture of compliance across Mercury. • Work closely with our Risk team, which owns AI governance, as Compliance’s AI product expert to contribute product-level guidance to ongoing AI governance updates. Core responsibilities: • Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Risk, Data, Operations, and Legal to bring Mercury's AI products to market in a manner that meets all relevant regulatory, financial partner, and network obligations. • Advise product and engineering teams throughout the product lifecycle—discovery, design, evaluation, launch, and iteration—to ensure AI products are compliant-by-design rather than reviewed after the fact. • Identify, assess, and document compliance risks specific to AI and agentic systems—including inaccurate or fabricated output, unauthorized or over-scoped agent action, inadequate consent and disclosure, unexplainable decisioning, disparate impact, data leakage across customers or organizations, prompt injection and third-party agent risk, and insufficient audit trail—and work cross-functionally to design pragmatic mitigation strategies. • Define the compliance requirements for the platforms AI is built on, in partnership with the teams that own them: the LLM gateway all internal traffic routes through, the internal app platform, agent orchestration frameworks, and the data access and governance layer. • Establish and refine AI-specific compliance standards for the department—what evidence a launch requires, what must be logged, what requires human review, what must be escalated, and what is out of bounds—and ensure those standards evolve as the organization and the technology grow. • Support new product launches and expansions by scoping, defining, and communicating compliance requirements clearly and early, including for co-marketing and distribution partnerships with third-party AI platforms. • Monitor regulatory, supervisory, and industry developments relevant to AI in financial services, assess impact, and drive implementation of required changes. • Own and oversee multiple concurrent high-impact AI compliance workstreams, holding project owners accountable for results and ensuring each aligns with department and company objectives. • Support remediation efforts for p