Senior Product Designer - Financial Crimes

Mercury•Portland, OR

19d

About The Position

In many countries, profits from drug trafficking and human exploitation are funneled through ordinary looking businesses, allowing serious harm to blend into everyday commerce. When financial systems are designed to notice unusual patterns, such as money that moves too fast or accounts that do not quite make sense, that flow can be interrupted. Each disrupted transaction makes it harder for criminal networks to scale and easier for legitimate businesses to thrive. Designing Financial Crimes systems is about creating those quiet interruptions: moments where the system pauses, asks a better question, and protects people by default. This is a unique opportunity to re-imagine and strengthen the tools and processes for the constantly evolving space of finCrimes, and to refine how systems surface risk, support good judgment, and scale trust. Over time, those small design decisions add up to safer communities and a financial system that rewards honest work. The Financial Crimes team is important to Mercury, because this work directly influences the company’s velocity, customer trust, and operational scale. In many countries, profits from drug trafficking and human exploitation are funneled through ordinary-looking businesses, allowing serious harm to blend into everyday commerce. Financial systems can interrupt that flow when they are designed to notice unusual patterns: money that moves too fast, activity that doesn’t quite add up, decisions that deserve a second look. At Mercury, designing Financial Crimes systems is important, because this work directly influences the company’s velocity, customer trust, and operational scale. It means shaping the internal tools and decision points that pause onboarding, surface risk, and support investigators in making high-stakes judgments at scale — while ensuring those moments are clear, fair, and minimally disruptive for legitimate customers. These are quiet interruptions, where the system asks a better question and protects people by default. Over time, small design decisions in these systems add up to safer communities, healthier businesses, and a financial platform that rewards honest work.

Requirements

Have 7+ years of product design experience, with ownership of end-to-end projects in complex or ambiguous problem spaces.
Enjoy both interaction design and systems thinking, especially building for multi-user, multi-modal, multi-step workflows that remain clear and usable under real-world constraints and edge cases.
Are comfortable designing alongside data-driven or automated systems and integrating AI or ML models into your products, including understanding how uncertainty, confidence, and human review should be represented in the interface.
Use prototyping as a core thinking tool to explore tradeoffs, test assumptions, and align cross-functional partners.
Have experience in data-heavy, regulated, or operationally complex domains (fintech, trust & safety, healthcare, security, or similar), or are motivated to deeply learn one.
Can translate complex technical or policy constraints into understandable, intuitive interfaces.
Ground your design decisions in contextual research and usability testing, and know how to turn messy, qualitative insight into concrete product direction with measurable impact.
Thrive in multi-stakeholder environments and can navigate disagreement with clarity, empathy, and a bias toward taking action.
Understand the balance between rigor and momentum, and know when to push for quality versus when to ship and iterate.
Value collaboration, humility, and shared ownership, especially when working alongside peers at different career levels, and on high-stakes problems with no perfect answers.

Responsibilities

Own high-stakes decision systems
Design for complex, multi-stakeholder ecosystems, supporting internal teams like investigators and strategists as well as external partners such as banks and regulators with efficient, configurable, and high-quality tools.
Balance risk detection, operational efficiency, and customer impact in systems where false positives and false negatives both carry real costs.
Build a deep understanding of the technical and policy foundations behind how Mercury detects unusual activity, applies rules or thresholds, and decides when human review or action is required.
Own the end-to-end design process: scoping projects, defining workflows, designing detailed interactions and visuals, and ensuring quality implementation.
Craft designs from first principles, anticipating edge cases and failure modes to ensure resilience in high-stakes contexts.
Prototype multiple UX and visual concepts, then refine toward the right solution.
Conduct deep, contextual research with investigators, strategists, and cross-functional partners to uncover hidden work, manual workarounds, and operational pain points.
Test designs with real users to validate comprehension, confidence, and decision quality in complex scenarios.
Use research insights to shape product direction and system design, and inform team understanding and product direction.
Partner closely with product, engineering, and investigations to contribute to strategy and roadmap.
Drive alignment by crafting narratives and prototypes that bring clarity across audiences - from engineers to executives.
Contribute to scalable design patterns that advance user outcomes and business goals. Improve consistency, speed, and confidence as Mercury grows.