Senior Model Risk Manager - AI​/ML

Mercury is building the financial stack — intuitive, powerful, and safe for entrepreneurs and businesses of all sizes. We have made a deliberate, company-wide bet on AI/ML. Across fraud detection, financial crime prevention, credit decisioning, and internal operations, machine learning and AI models are becoming core to how Mercury works, and that portfolio is growing fast.

As AI transforms financial services, every institution is being forced to ask a hard question: what does model risk management (MRM) actually mean in this new era? ML has powered fraud detection and credit decisioning for years, but the scope and technology has changed dramatically. Generative models, autonomous agents, and real‑time systems are creating risks that existing MRM frameworks were never designed to govern.

No one has fully solved this yet.

We want to hire the person who will. Ideal candidates may come from a traditional model validation background with deep hands‑on experience testing modern AI/ML systems, or from model development, applied AI, or research as data scientists, with a strong understanding of how risks emerge in complex systems and how to rigorously challenge them as they scale into production.

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

As Senior Model Risk Manager – AI/ML, you will define what model governance looks like for AI/ML t means continuously building and enhancing the frameworks, not just inheriting them. You will own validation, monitoring, and governance of Mercury’s AI/ML model portfolio, but more than that, you will be a thought leader in an industry‑wide conversation about how MRM must evolve in the context of AI.

You will partner closely with data scientists, engineers, compliance leads, and product teams, and you will help shape not just Mercury’s approach, but set a standard for what rigorous, forward‑looking MRM on AI can look like in fintech.

• Maintain and enhance Mercury’s model governance framework, including inventory standards, documentation templates, validation standards, and issue management.
• Assess whether first‑line monitoring efforts are effective, proportionate to model risk, and sufficient to keep models fit for purpose over time.

• Perform independent validation across predictive ML models, generative AI systems, and agentic workflows, covering data, assumptions, methodology, testing, and monitoring.
• Assess risks in LLM‑powered applications, including RAG pipelines, tool use, autonomy boundaries, human oversight, and hallucination risk.
• Identify and document model limitations, failure modes, and emerging AI risks including drift, instability, fairness, and robustness concerns.

• Serve as a trusted advisor to data scientists, engineers, product teams, and risk partners throughout the AI/ML lifecycle to provide practical guidance on model risk, governance expectations, and control design without slowing responsible innovation.
• Evaluate new AI use cases for regulatory implications, materiality, and governance requirements prior to deployment.
• Help shape Mercury’s responsible AI standards, including explainability, bias assessment, testing, human oversight, and documentation.

• Develop and maintain AI‑enabled automation tools to improve the speed, scale, and effectiveness of model governance and validation workflows.
• Modernize the MRM function to operate effectively in a fast‑moving AI environment while maintaining strong governance standards.

• Champion MRM as a strategic enabler of safe and scalable AI/ML adoption, not simply a control function.
• Build model risk literacy across engineering, product, data science, compliance, and risk teams.

• Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative field (e.g. Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, Mathematics, etc.) with 6‑10 years of meaningful hands‑on experience developing or validating AI/ML models and systems, ideally in financial services or fintech.
• Strong technical foundations in Python, SQL, and modern ML tooling (e.g.…