Strategic Finance - R&D/G&A

Mercury•Portland, OR

1d•$128,600 - $160,700•Hybrid

About The Position

This role focuses on Strategic Finance within the R&D/G&A functions. The core challenge is managing financial planning and decision-making for organizations whose most critical outputs are difficult to quantify, such as the value of a legal team before it's needed or the returns from engineering platform investments. The company, Mercury, is modernizing banking for startups and aims to scale with a fast-moving product and engineering organization. This finance partner will be embedded with G&A and R&D teams, understanding how headcount plans translate to roadmaps, how infrastructure costs relate to product decisions, and applying financial rigor to teams that may not operate on a quarterly basis. The individual will collaborate closely with Engineering, Product, Design, and G&A leadership to support planning, resource allocation, and decision-making.

Requirements

3-5 years of experience in investment banking, strategic finance, or consulting.
Ideally, experience with technology companies or organizations where headcount is the primary cost driver.
Strong financial modeling skills, capable of building flexible headcount or opex models from scratch and explaining them clearly.
Good judgment regarding the level of precision required for decisions.
Genuine curiosity about how product and engineering organizations function, including team structure, infrastructure cost scaling, and people investment ROI.
Ability to build trust quickly with non-finance partners.
Comfortable asking clarifying questions in meetings with engineers or lawyers.
Ability to independently pull and work with data using tools like SQL, BI tools, or FP&A platforms.
Clear communication skills, able to distill complex analyses into concise narratives for leadership.
Ability to determine when to lead with numbers versus context.

Responsibilities

Serve as the dedicated finance partner to R&D and G&A leadership, owning the financial relationship with Engineering, Product, Design, HR, Legal, and Finance teams.
Understand team priorities deeply to anticipate their financial questions.
Own headcount and operating expense planning for R&D and G&A organizations.
Build and maintain bottom-up financial models for R&D and G&A cost bases, including headcount, vendor spend, infrastructure costs, and discretionary budgets.
Support strategic resource allocation decisions, assisting R&D leaders with build vs. buy trade-offs, team sizing, and investment prioritization.
Help G&A leaders evaluate vendor contracts, assess scaling ratios, and manage cost efficiency.
Drive annual planning and ongoing forecasting cycles for R&D and G&A organizations.
Translate business priorities into financial plans and manage the forecast-to-actuals variance process.
Surface insights to help leaders adjust course in real-time.
Provide financial framing and analysis for ambiguous investment questions, such as evaluating new engineering platforms, sizing legal teams, or assessing the ROI of people programs.