Senior Sanctions Investigator
Mercury
Mercury is building a complete finance stack for startups. We work hard to create the easiest and safest banking* experience possible to simplify entrepreneurs' and business owners’ financial lives. The challenge is to do so while ensuring we protect Mercury, customers and the broader financial ecosystem from bad actors and harmful, illegal or unauthorized activities.
At Mercury, we’re taking Financial Crimes extremely seriously. The Sanctions team conducts investigations, develops procedures and builds controls with cross-functional partners to prevent, detect and report sanctioned and out of policy activities. We’re growing and seeking a Senior Sanctions Investigator to lead complex investigations, drive program improvements (including building our export controls process), and support daily operations across watchlist screening, transaction monitoring, and alerts for PEPs and adverse media. You’ll balance an eagle eye for risk with an excellent user experience.
*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC..
As part of the journey, we would expect you to:
- Own high-risk investigations end-to-end across onboarding and ongoing monitoring, including sanctions, PEP/adverse media, and complex cross-border payment reviews.
- Build and mature program controls for sanctions and export controls (e.g., dual-use risk identification, escalation pathways, documentation standards, runbooks).
- Lead ad-hoc sanctions operations projects that improve accuracy, speed, and customer experience - process redesigns, playbooks, QC frameworks, and tooling requirements.
- Work the queues: Triage and resolve screening and transaction alerts with strong judgment; craft clear RFIs and make defendable decisions (clear, reject, block, escalate).
- Serve as a subject-matter expert to Compliance, Onboarding, Support, Product, and Legal; advise on edge cases, new product flows, and control coverage.
- Improve detection quality by partnering with data/engineering on rules tuning, scenarios, and metrics; contribute to testing and model/threshold reviews.
- Elevate team capability: Mentor investigators, deliver training, and perform quality assurance reviews with actionable feedback.
- Regulatory-ready documentation: Maintain crisp case notes, decision rationales, and evidence; support audits, exams, and internal reviews.
- Reporting & obligations: Support required sanctions reporting (e.g., blocked property reports) and internal risk memos as needed.
Some things that might make you successful in a role like this:
- 3+ years in sanctions/financial crimes investigations at a bank/fintech or consulting/regulatory environment, including complex case ownership.
- Demonstrated experience with OFAC (and ideally EU/UK regimes) and familiarity with export controls concepts (EAR/ITAR, dual-use risk, end-use/end-user diligence).
- Strong investigative toolkit: open-source research, link analysis, adverse-media assessment, and ownership/beneficial-ownership tracing.
- Clear, concise writing; you can draft decision memos and procedures that stand up to audit/exam review.
- Bias for action and sound judgment under time pressure; comfortable balancing risk mitigation with great customer experience.
- Collaborative style - able to partner with Legal, Product, Engineering, and Risk to ship improvements
- ACAMS, CFCS, ACSS/CGSS certification
- Understanding of common payment and funds transfer methods and networks, their functioning and their liability rules such as card networks, ACH network, check processing, P2P, wire transfers, etc.
- Experience designing or enhancing export controls workflows in an operations setting.
The total rewards package at Mercury includes base salary, equity, 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 the New York City or San Francisco Bay Area: $120,300 - $150,400 USD
- US employees outside of the New York City or San Francisco Bay Area: $108,300 - $135,400 USD
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.
We use Covey as part of our hiring and / or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT. As part of the evaluation process we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound on January 22, 2024. Please see the independent bias audit report covering our use of Covey here.
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