Strategic Finance Lead — AI
Leads financial planning and product-margin analysis for AI inference and model spend, partnering with product and technical teams on pricing, deployment, and cost optimization. Requires 4+ years in strategic finance or a related field and experience with AI or consumption-based business models.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Lead budgeting, monthly forecasting, variance analysis, and financial planning for inference and model spend.
- Build and maintain product-margin models that reconcile revenue, serving costs, and gross margin using production usage data.
- Analyze model provider contracts, pricing structures, cost drivers, and optimization opportunities across the model portfolio and routing mix.
- Own the source of truth for cost per request, margin by product and tier, and customer-segment and feature-level economics.
- Forecast consolidated model costs and translate product roadmaps and model transitions into projected spend and margin trajectories.
- Assess the margin impact of pricing, packaging, and model-deployment decisions to inform product and pricing strategy.
- Partner with product, inference, and data engineering teams to translate usage and serving-cost dynamics into financial frameworks.
Requirements
- 4+ years of experience in strategic finance, private equity, growth equity, consulting, or investment banking, preferably with software or AI product experience.
- Exceptional analytical, problem-solving, and critical-thinking skills.
- Experience building complex financial operating models and developing frameworks for product margin and unit economics.
- Strong attention to detail when analyzing interconnected usage, revenue, and cost data.
- Ability to communicate complex financial information clearly to non-finance audiences.
- Sound commercial judgment across pricing, packaging, discounting, and growth-versus-margin tradeoffs.
- Proven experience partnering with technical and product teams on financial optimization initiatives.
- Background in AI, machine learning, or consumption-based business models with complex cost structures.
- Proficiency with financial modeling tools.
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience managing financials for AI or large language model products, including direct work with model providers or inference platforms.
- Expertise in usage-based pricing, subscription economics, and gross-margin and COGS attribution by customer and model family.
- Experience with model-serving economics, including latency, throughput, and token usage effects on margin performance.
Skills
Financial Modeling, Strategic Finance, Forecasting, Variance Analysis, Unit Economics, Product Margins, Usage-Based Pricing, Subscription Economics, Cogs Attribution, AI, Machine Learning, LLMs, Model Serving, Data Analysis, Pricing Strategy
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