R&D Strategic Finance Lead

The role

You will build and lead the Finance function for the Research and Engineering organization. You will own the model for compute commitments and track training, inference, and infrastructure spend. You will partner with leaders on headcount plans, budgets, and compute tradeoffs.

What you will do

• Build and lead the Finance function for the Research and Engineering organization
• Own the model for compute commitments
• Track training, inference and infrastructure spend against commitments and product usage
• Forecast spend as the product scales
• Partner with company leaders on headcount plans, budgets, and compute tradeoffs
• Work with the procurement lead on compute and vendor negotiations
• Work with Accounting on R&D cost treatment and capitalization
• Turn cost per query, contribution, gross margin, and infrastructure efficiency into strategy

Required qualifications

• Owned Finance for an engineering or infrastructure organization at a high-growth tech company
• Understand reserved vs. on-demand pricing, GPU commitments, and how utilization drives long-term unit economics
• Ability to turn engineering builds into a trusted cost model
• Experience in high-rigor environments
• Experience working where data is messy and processes do not exist yet
• Experience telling technical leaders, founders, or CEOs that plans are too expensive and finding cheaper alternatives
• Use AI tools to do real work faster

Nice to have

• Ideally one where compute or cloud was a major cost line

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Generous equity
• Visa sponsorships
• 401K plans
• Daily lunch & office snacks
• Dinner at the office
• Unlimited vacation
• Caltrain pass reimbursement

About the company

Parallel is a web infrastructure company. Their products are used by businesses in sales, marketing, insurance, and coding to build AI agents.