Senior Financial Analyst, R&D Finance

Responsibilities

• Strategic Business Partnership: Act as an autonomous finance partner to R&D, Product, and Engineering leadership. Lead cross-functional conversations to determine whether infrastructure cost surges are driven by healthy customer volume growth or inefficient engineering configurations.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner seamlessly across Accounting, Engineering, FP&A, and FinOps teams to ensure accurate COGS/OpEx accounting classifications and product-line allocation of cloud costs, while driving upstream process automation and data integrity.
• Dynamic Financial Forecasting: Lead the monthly and quarterly forecasting process for R&D hosting infrastructure. Build dynamic models capable of managing complex, non-linear cloud billings from major providers and LLM partners.
• Operational Variance Analysis: Conduct deep-dive variance analyses and link financial outcomes directly to usage changes driven by product/market dynamics, translating technical platform adjustments into clear financial impacts.
• Cost-Containment Optimization: Proactively identify engineering cost-containment opportunities and partner with product managers to design and track cloud cost-efficiency strategies while maintaining platform performance.
• Financial Modeling: Lead strategic projects, analysis, deepdives to drive ROI opportunities and costs reductions. Build flexible financial models to support scenario planning, product expansions, and support data-driven investment trade-offs.
• Infrastructure Metrics Tracking: Track and analyze vendor spend patterns, cloud capacity utilization, and budget consumption across core R&D functions.
• Strategic Communication: Communicate complex financial analyses and technical cloud cost structures in clear, actionable ways to non-financial audiences and engineering stakeholders.

Requirements

• 5+ years of finance experience in progressive FP&A, operational finance or strategic corporate finance roles.
• Detail-oriented mindset with strong analytical, problem-solving, and deep-dive capabilities to thoroughly investigate complex technical issues and evaluate massive cloud data footprints.
• Expertise in leveraging Excel/Google Sheets to construct multi-variable, driver-based models, specifically for completing complex unit economics and cloud infrastructure spend analysis.
• Proven ability to operate independently and thrive within highly ambiguous environments, moving beyond basic data pulling to drive strategic engineering conversations.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with a proven ability to translate complex cloud architecture variances to non-financial product stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to drive simplification and automation of financial and business processes, modeling and reporting.

Nice-to-Haves

• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Business, Economics, Computer Science, or a related operational field.
• Direct experience managing cloud infrastructure/hosting spend within a high-growth Technology, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), or Cloud environment.
• Familiarity with enterprise planning applications (Anaplan), ERP systems (Oracle), or specialized cloud cost optimization tools.
• Demonstrated ability to use Gen AI tools to drive simplification and automation.

Compensation & Benefits

• Based in Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont or Washington D.C.: $96,640–$120,800
• Based in New York, New Jersey, Washington State, or California (outside of the San Francisco Bay area): $102,240–$127,800
• Based in the San Francisco Bay area, California: $113,600–$142,000
• Eligible for equity plan and corporate bonus plan
• Health care insurance, 401(k) retirement account, paid sick time, paid personal time off, paid parental leave