Senior Product Partnerships Manager - Payroll

Mercury is building a full stack of financial tools for startups. We work hard to create dashboards with thought and simplicity. You can check out our demo dashboard at www.demo.mercury.com.

Underneath all of our products is a massive web of partners users don’t see, that require significant product and process investment. That’s where the Product Partnerships team comes in. The Product Partnership team maintains our external relationships and streamlines our collective workflows to keep customers, partners, and Mercury employees happy. 

As a Senior Product Partnerships Manager on the Expansion team, you’ll own a portfolio of strategic partnerships end-to-end — with a particular focus on Mercury's payroll vendor ecosystem. You'll manage the full lifecycle of these relationships: from evaluating and onboarding new vendors through RFP and contract negotiation, to ongoing performance management, incident response, and new product launches. You will work within a complex ecosystem of internal and external stakeholders, facilitating productive discussions across product, legal, finance, and engineering. You’ll build genuine trust with partners over time, while holding them accountable to their commitments and bring insights from the partner ecosystem back into Mercury’s product roadmap. 

You should be a creative problem solver who thinks of new ways to address partner and product issues. You should drive cross functional initiatives  with thoughtful communication and collaboration. On a daily basis you will manage both the tactical and operational needs of our partners, as well as the overarching strategy as we continue to scale. This will require a mix of operations, product thinking, and relationship building skills.

Secure, reliable, thoughtful, and (perhaps) magical is how a user should describe banking* on Mercury. Your job is to ensure that our payroll partners live up to this standard as we scale.

*Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.

What You Will Do: 

• Manage a portfolio of expansion partnerships end-to-end, with particular focus on Mercury’s payroll vendor ecosystem
• Lead vendor selection processes, including evaluating RFPs and making recommendations on best-fit partners for Mercury’s product and business needs
• Structure and lead negotiations, evaluating the economics behind proposed deals, understanding the available levers, and knowing when to push versus compromise
• Sell the impact and value of being a partner to Mercury, while negotiating the best outcomes for Mercury
• Serve as Mercury’s internal expert on the payroll vendor ecosystem — building and maintaining our collective knowledge base
• Proactively identify and respond to partner incidents, integration issues, and escalations — unblocking teams with urgency and sound judgment
• Facilitate productive cross-functional discussions across product, legal, finance, and engineering — driving alignment and unblocking teams 

What You Should Bring: 

• 8+ years of relevant banking/payroll operations experience and strategic partnerships experience with a track record of leading deals end-to-end, including contract negotiation
• Experience managing or working closely with lending management system providers
• Be a strong partnership leader who enjoys owning complex, high-stakes relationships
• Be an excellent communicator and highly organized project manager, comfortable operating across many stakeholders
• Consistently exercise empathy, especially in highly regulated and constrained environments
• Have a strong product sense and interest in how financial infrastructure enables customer outcomes
• Be an effective negotiator with experi