Strategic Finance - R&D/G&A

What You’ll Do:

• Be the dedicated finance partner to R&D and G&A leadership. Own the financial relationship with our Engineering, Product, Design, HR, Legal, and Finance teams. Understand their priorities deeply enough to anticipate their questions before they ask them.
• Own headcount and operating expense planning for your orgs. Build and maintain the bottoms-up models that drive our R&D and G&A cost bases—headcount by team, vendor spend, allocated infrastructure costs, and discretionary budgets—and keep them current as plans evolve.
• Support strategic resource allocation decisions. Help R&D leaders think through build vs. buy tradeoffs, team sizing decisions, and investment prioritization. Help G&A leaders evaluate vendor contracts, assess functional scaling ratios, and manage cost efficiency as the company grows.
• Drive the annual planning and ongoing forecasting cycles for your orgs. Translate business priorities into financial plans, own the forecast-to-actuals variance process, and surface insights that help leaders adjust course in real time.
• Bring structure to ambiguous investment questions. Whether it’s evaluating a new engineering platform, sizing a legal team for a new product line, or assessing the ROI of a people program, you’ll take complex, qualitative problems and return clear financial framing and a point of view.

You Might Be a Fit If You:

• Have 3–5 years of experience in investment banking, strategic finance, or consulting—ideally with some exposure to technology companies or organizations where headcount is the primary cost driver.
• Are a strong financial modeler who can build a clean, flexible headcount or opex model from scratch, and explain it to someone who doesn’t live in spreadsheets. You have good judgment about what level of precision a given decision actually requires—you know when to build the model and when a back-of-envelope answer is better.
• Are genuinely curious about how product and engineering organizations work—you want to understand what drives team structure, why infrastructure costs scale the way they do, and what makes a people investment pay off.
• Build trust quickly with non-finance partners. You’re comfortable walking into a room full of engineers or lawyers and asking the questions that get you to the real answer.
• Are comfortable pulling and working with data independently—SQL, BI tools, or FP&A platforms—to support your own analysis without relying on a data team.
• Communicate with clarity—you can distill a complex cost driver analysis into a crisp narrative for a leadership team, and you know when to lead with the number and when to lead with the context.