Senior Product Partnerships Manager - Payroll

Mercury Mercury · Fintech · Remote · Bank & Payments Partnerships

Mercury is a fintech company building financial tools for startups. This role focuses on managing strategic partnerships, particularly within the payroll vendor ecosystem, to ensure seamless integration and customer satisfaction. Responsibilities include vendor selection, negotiation, performance management, and cross-functional collaboration to drive product roadmap improvements.

What you'd actually do

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

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of relevant banking/payroll operations experience and strategic partnerships experience
  • track record of leading deals end-to-end, including contract negotiation
  • managing or working closely with lending management system providers
  • strong partnership leader
  • excellent communicator
  • highly organized project manager
  • comfortable operating across many stakeholders
  • empathy
  • strong product sense
  • interest in how financial infrastructure enables customer outcomes
  • effective negotiator
  • experience navigating complex commercial and regulatory discussions
  • technically inclined or comfortable interfacing with engineering and compliance teams on complex systems
  • calm and focused while working on multiple critical initiatives in parallel
  • creativity

What the JD emphasized

  • 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
  • highly regulated and constrained environments
  • operating within regulatory and operational constraints