What We're Looking ForWe're looking for an exceptional early-career operator to join the Corporate Strategy & Transformation team and help turn Cross River's strategic ambitions into reality. Reporting to the Head of Corporate Strategy & Transformation, you'll sit at the center of the bank's most important cross-functional initiatives - from AI adoption to international expansion - and play a hands-on role in driving them from idea to delivery.
This is a builder role. You'll spend little time producing decks and most time scoping problems, finding solutions, moving initiatives forward, and bringing people along. It's a rare chance to work directly with senior leadership on the questions that shape where the company goes next.
Responsibilities:Drive AI adoption across the bank (~40% of time)
- Partner with the AI team and business-line leaders to identify high-value AI use cases - sitting with teams to understand where the real friction and opportunities are.
- Pressure-test and validate each opportunity: size the impact, gauge feasibility, and separate the genuinely transformative bets from the noise.
- Work hand-in-hand with product and technical teams to turn a validated use case into a working solution.
- Drive the change-management side hands-on - helping build the playbook, engaging stakeholders directly to explain what's changing and why it matters, turning skeptics into champions, and sustaining adoption through the messy middle of a rollout until it sticks.
Support hands-on, high-priority strategic initiatives (~40%)
- Support hands-on the execution of strategic bets like global expansion - helping select target geographies, shape entry and partnership models, and support partner negotiations and deal structuring.
- Do the real work alongside leadership rather than advising from the sidelines: scope and own discrete workstreams, proactively surface risks, and clear roadblocks before they become problems.
Support the corporate strategy agenda (~20%)
- Help shape Cross River's long-term strategy - pressure-testing where the bank should play and how it wins, and turning that into clear, defensible direction for leadership.
- Help translate executive vision into a clear, practical narrative the organization can rally around - breaking big strategic intent into concrete initiatives with defined owners and accountable timelines.
- Establish lightweight, repeatable ways to scan and synthesize external developments - partner moves, regulatory shifts, competitive activity - into clear implications for leadership.
- Look for opportunities to automate, templatize, and systematize the team's work so the function punches well above its headcount.
Qualifications:Must-Haves
- ~2-3 years of relevant experience in strategy consulting, corporate strategy, or a strategy & operations role at a high-growth startup or scaling company - weighted toward operating and execution experience over planning.
- High emotional intelligence and real people skills. You build trust quickly, read a room, and bring busy or skeptical stakeholders along through change - comfortable engaging directly with everyone from analysts to executives.
- A genuinely AI-native way of working. You use AI tools fluently to multiply your output and move at exceptional speed - and you hold a high enough quality bar that what you ship is sharp, accurate, and trustworthy, never generic or half-checked.
- A builder's instinct. You'd rather put a rough working version in front of people than polish a plan; you default to "how could I automate or build this?"; and you likely tinker and build things outside of work too.
- Strong autonomy. You operate well with ambiguity and limited direction, take initiative without waiting to be told, and figure out what needs doing.
Nice-to-Haves
- Prior financial services, payments, or fintech experience.
- Experience working on change management for technology rollouts.
- Exposure to partnership/deal structuring.
#LI-KR1 #LI-Hybrid
Salary Range: $80,000.00 - $130,000.00
