Strategic Finance - R&D/G&A
WFA Digital Insight
Mercury's Strategic Finance role stands out for its focus on supporting R&D and G&A teams, requiring a deep understanding of how headcount plans and infrastructure costs impact product development. This role demands a finance partner who can build trust with non-finance stakeholders and provide clear financial framing for complex investment questions. What makes this role unique is the opportunity to work closely with Engineering, Product, Design, and G&A leadership, helping them plan and make decisions with confidence.
Job Description
“The most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable—but successful management must nevertheless take account of them.” — W. Edwards Deming
That tension is at the heart of G&A and R&D finance. How do you measure the value of a great legal team before you need them? How do you quantify the compounding returns of an engineering platform investment? How do you build a financial plan around organizations whose most important outputs resist clean quantification?
At Mercury, we’re modernizing banking for startups and ambitious companies—and doing it with a product and engineering organization that moves fast. As we scale, we need a finance partner who can go deep with our G&A and R&D teams: someone who understands how headcount plans become roadmaps, how infrastructure costs relate to product bets, and how to bring financial rigor to organizations that don’t think in quarters.
You’ll be embedded with our Engineering, Product, Design, and G&A leadership, helping them plan, allocate, and make decisions with confidence.
What You’ll Do:
- Be the dedicated finance partner to R&D and G&A leadership. Own the financial relationship with our Engineering, Product, Design, HR, Legal, and Finance teams. Understand their priorities deeply enough to anticipate their questions before they ask them.
- Own headcount and operating expense planning for your orgs. Build and maintain the bottoms-up models that drive our R&D and G&A cost bases—headcount by team, vendor spend, allocated infrastructure costs, and discretionary budgets—and keep them current as plans evolve.
- Support strategic resource allocation decisions. Help R&D leaders think through build vs. buy tradeoffs, team sizing decisions, and investment prioritization. Help G&A leaders evaluate vendor contracts, assess functional scaling ratios, and manage cost efficiency as the company grows.
- Drive the annual planning and ongoing forecasting cycles for your orgs. Translate business priorities into financial plans, own the forecast-to-actuals variance process, and surface insights that help leaders adjust course in real time.
- Bring structure to ambiguous investment questions. Whether it’s evaluating a new engineering platform, sizing a legal team for a new product line, or assessing the ROI of a people program, you’ll take complex, qualitative problems and return clear financial framing and a point of view.
You Might Be a Fit If You:
- Have 3–5 years of experience in investment banking, strategic finance, or consulting—ideally with some exposure to technology companies or organizations where headcount is the primary cost driver.
- Are a strong financial modeler who can build a clean, flexible headcount or opex model from scratch, and explain it to someone who doesn’t live in spreadsheets. You have good judgment about what level of precision a given decision actually requires—you know when to build the model and when a back-of-envelope answer is better.
- Are genuinely curious about how product and engineering organizations work—you want to understand what drives team structure, why infrastructure costs scale the way they do, and what makes a people investment pay off.
- Build trust quickly with non-finance partners. You’re comfortable walking into a room full of engineers or lawyers and asking the questions that get you to the real answer.
- Are comfortable pulling and working with data independently—SQL, BI tools, or FP&A platforms—to support your own analysis without relying on a data team.
- Communicate with clarity—you can distill a complex cost driver analysis into a crisp narrative for a leadership team, and you know when to lead with the number and when to lead with the context.
The total rewards package at Mercury includes base salary, equity (stock options/RSUs), 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 in New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, or the San Francisco Bay Area: $142,900 - $160,700
- US employees outside of the New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle or the San Francisco Bay Area: $128,600 - $144,600
- Canadian employees (any location): CAD 135,000 - 151,900
Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC
Mercury values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Mercury are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities or special needs. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.
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How to Stand Out
- Be prepared to discuss your experience with financial modeling and analysis, and how you've applied these skills in previous roles.
- Show a genuine interest in understanding the company's product development and engineering processes, and how you can support these teams with financial planning and analysis.
- Highlight your ability to build trust and communicate effectively with non-finance stakeholders, including engineers, lawyers, and other cross-functional teams.
- Be ready to walk through your experience with data analysis and visualization tools, including SQL, BI tools, or FP&A platforms.
- Emphasize your ability to work independently and manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment, with a focus on delivering high-quality results under tight deadlines.
- Prepare to discuss your experience working in a remote or virtual environment, and how you stay connected and build strong relationships with colleagues and stakeholders.
- Don't be afraid to ask questions about the company's financial performance and key drivers of growth, demonstrating your interest in the role and the company's success.
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