Strategic Finance Manager, EPD
Partner with Engineering and Product to own infrastructure and AI COGS, build cost visibility tooling, drive efficiency initiatives, and develop unit economics and margin forecasts for a consumption-based platform.
About the job
Infrastructure & AI COGS Ownership
- Own financial visibility into compute, bandwidth, storage, and AI-related costs (e.g., inference, GPU/accelerated workloads)
- Translate product and infrastructure usage (requests, execution time, tokens, etc.) into clear cost drivers
- Partner with EPD to drive cost-efficient architecture and scaling decisions
Cost Visibility & Accountability
- Build self-service cost tooling for Product and Engineering (cost per request, per workload, per AI query)
- Enable teams to own and optimize their infrastructure footprint
- Standardize cost attribution across products and multi-tenant systems
Efficiency & Margin Expansion
- Lead infrastructure and AI efficiency initiatives (compute optimization, caching, vendor strategy)
- Define north star metrics (e.g., cost per request, cost per AI call, cost per GB)
- Embed cost efficiency into roadmaps and product decisions
Cost Allocation & Financial Rigor
- Develop scalable cost allocation frameworks across products, customers, and workloads
- Improve gross margin visibility, including AI product margins
- Support auditability and IPO readiness
Unit Economics
- Define product-level unit economics across Vercel’s product suite
- Connect usage (requests, compute, tokens, etc) to revenue and COGS
COGS / Gross Margin Forecasting
- Build driver-based models linking usage, revenue, and infrastructure costs
- Forecast COGS across core platform and AI products for both PLG & SLG segments
- Model margin impact of scale and efficiency improvements
Pricing & Packaging
- Partner on usage-based and AI pricing models
- Evaluate tradeoffs between growth, adoption, and margin
- Ensure pricing is reflected in forecasts and unit economics
Requirements
- 5-8+ years in Strategic Finance, FP&A, IB, or Consulting
- Experience with consumption-based or cloud infrastructure businesses
- Strong modeling skills; experience with driver-based forecasting
- Ability to partner with technical teams and translate usage → financial insight
- SQL / data tooling experience strongly preferred
Skills
Financial Modeling, Driver-Based Forecasting, SQL, Cost Allocation, Unit Economics, Gross Margin Analysis, Cloud Infrastructure, Ai Cost Optimization, Consumption-Based Pricing, Data Tooling
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