Strategic Operations Lead - Credit and Lending

Strategic Operations Lead - Credit and Lending

San Francisco, CA, New York, NY, Portland, OR, or Remote within Canada or United States

Mercury is building Mercury Bank, N.A., a proposed nationally chartered bank focused on serving ambitious businesses. Credit and lending are central to that mission, and as we migrate our charge card and term loan products to the Bank's own balance sheet and build the next generation of lending infrastructure, we need someone who can hold the full program together.

Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.

The Sr. Technical Program Manager for Credit and Lending will own end-to-end delivery of the technology programs that power Mercury's charge card, term loan, and adjacent credit products. You will be the connective tissue between Engineering, Product, Risk, Compliance, Treasury, and Operations: setting strategy for how these programs run, surfacing tradeoffs that unblock leaders, sequencing the critical path, and ensuring that what ships is audit-ready from day one.

We are looking for someone who has operated at this level before, in a regulated environment, at scale, with real accountability for outcomes.

• Own the integrated program plan across all active credit and lending work streams, covering milestones, dependencies, and critical paths across Engineering, Product, Risk, Compliance, Treasury, and Operations.
• Proactively manage sequencing, resourcing tradeoffs, and escalations. When initiatives are off-track, you identify it first and bring a recommended path forward.
• Ensure Compliance, Treasury, and Operations readiness lands alongside product and regulatory milestones
• Drive incident learnings back into design, test coverage, and runbooks so each issue improves the underlying system, not just fixes the symptom.

• Keep a single source of truth for status, decisions, risks, and owners. Maintain a living RAID log with clear owners and impact assessments.
• Facilitate structured decision-making by surfacing options and tradeoffs to leaders before problems escalte.
• Build and improve the operating systems that drive credit and lending product decisions: planning cycles, reviews, decision frameworks, launch readiness.

• Produce concise, predictable updates calibrated to the audience.
• Synthesize complex cross-functional information into recommendations that help executives decide and move.
• Produce documentation of program objectives, architecture decisions, and operational impacts that onboards new team members without requiring a meeting to explain it.
• Function as a trusted thought partner to engineering leads, product managers, and senior leadership.

• Identify inefficiencies and eliminate them through automation, AI tooling, or process redesign.
• Lead technical retrospectives and post-mortems, ensuring learnings are systematized rather than forgotten.

• 10+ years of program management or technical program management in a high-growth or regulated environment.
• Direct experience in financial services, fintech, or credit infrastructure. Compliance, audit, reporting and risk management obligations are familiar territory.
• Track record of operating at the department or business level, owning programs with multiple concurrent work streams and cross-functional accountability.
• Proven ability to communicate with and influence executive stakeholders, in writing and in high-stakes meetings, without a senior manager to translate.
• Bonus:
  Familiarity with the lending tooling ecosystem such as loan origination, credit risk management and lending management systems.

• Product-first. You evaluate everything through: what is the user problem, what is the fastest path to learning, what actually moves the needle.
• AI-native. You use AI tools to do your actual work. You have built workflows or tooling that changed how your team operates. When you see a repetitive process, you automate it.
• Comfortable in ambiguity. You build structure where there is none.
• Systems thinker. You see dependencies, second-order effects, and points of failure before they surface, and you build programs that account for them.
• Energized by building and operating. You do your best work designing the system and running it well once it is built.

• Technical fluency. You can understand and challenge engineering decisions, identify technical risks early, and translate complexity for non-technical stakeholders.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication. You write documentation that clarifies hard decisions and build frameworks teams actually adopt.
• Commercial instincts. You understand the financial dynamics of a lending business well enough to evaluate tradeoffs with authority.
• High emotional intelligence. You build trust quickly across engineering, product, risk, and executive stakeholders. You…