Chief Audit Officer

Mercury Mercury · Fintech · Remote · Audit

This role is for a Chief Audit Officer at a fintech company. The primary focus is on establishing and leading an independent assurance program to ensure the company's financial, operational, and technical resilience as it scales. The role involves partnering with the Board and Audit Committee, managing risk-based audit strategies, ensuring comprehensive audit coverage across the technology stack, validating product workflows and financial controls, acting as a liaison with regulators, and implementing data-driven continuous monitoring systems. The goal is to balance innovation with rigorous oversight, ensuring integrity and regulatory compliance.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own the Audit Vision — evolve the risk-based internal audit strategy and ensure alignment with the company’s growth, regulatory expectations, and emerging risks.
  2. Provide Independent Assurance — deliver objective evaluations to the Board and Audit Committee(s) on the effectiveness of our risk management, internal controls, and governance.
  3. Ensure we Audit the Stack — own the audit universe; ensuring completeness of Audit coverage across Mercury. Oversee the audit program to ensure the plan includes the appropriate mix of technical and operational audits that dive deep into our business, automated movement of funds, and cloud infrastructure to ensure data integrity and security.
  4. Validate the "Magic" — ensure our audit program includes timely validation that new and existing product workflows and financial controls are operating exactly as intended, identifying potential friction before it impacts the customer.
  5. Bridge the Regulatory Gap — act as a key point of contact for our partner banks and regulators, providing them with the confidence that Mercury’s internal oversight is rigorous and proactive.

Skills

Required

  • proven leadership in audit
  • built or scaled internal audit functions within high-growth banking or financial services
  • technical fluency
  • comfortable in a cloud-native, remote-first environment
  • discuss API integrity and automated controls
  • navigate the regulatory landscape with confidence
  • strong and effective independence
  • communicate clearly and simply
  • balance protection with possibility
  • lead with curiosity and vision
  • inspire and develop others

Nice to have

  • intersection of traditional finance and fintech innovation
  • discuss balance sheets and reconciliations
  • fortitude to deliver difficult news and the diplomacy to ensure those insights lead to positive change
  • cut through jargon and make risk concepts understandable and actionable
  • safeguard the company without slowing it down
  • see the audit function as a way to unlock and safeguard innovation, not stop it
  • ambitious about where audit can go in a modern fintech
  • explore new ideas, new markets, and new ways of serving customers safely
  • build strong teams, mentor future leaders, and foster a culture of accountability, transparency, and trust across the company

What the JD emphasized

  • regulatory expectations
  • regulators
  • partner banks and regulators