“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