Financial Director @ Frontier AI Lab - $400k plus Equity

Founding Strategic Finance Lead (Director / Senior Director)

Palo Alto / SF Bay Area · Hybrid (3 days per week)

Upto $400k plus Equity & Benefits

A frontier AI lab building general-purpose world models is hiring its first dedicated Strategic Finance leader. Compute is the lifeblood of this business and its single largest capital decision.

Right now, no one is turning an exponential, hard-to-predict growth curve into financeable, defensible plans. That's this role. You'll own the financial engine of a compute-intensive AI company and operate as a director-level adult directly under leadership.

What you'll own

• Compute and capital-allocation strategy — sizing the company's largest bets correctly under deep uncertainty, and making sure research is never left under-resourced.
• Compute acquisition and procurement — negotiating multi-hundred-million-scale commitments while balancing frontier ambition against balance-sheet risk.
• Financial models for exponential, non-linear growth — planning across a cone of uncertainty, not a single forecast.
• Unit economics and gross margin of training and serving models, plus pricing across platform/API and application offerings.
• The capital narrative — building the models, diligence, and story that make the company's economics credible to investors, the board, and the leadership team.
• A 0→1, AI-native finance org: the controls, reporting, and liquidity management appropriate for lumpy, large-scale capital commitments.

Who you are

• Deep experience in capital-intensive or infrastructure-heavy sectors; scaled AI companies, hyperscalers, neoclouds, or big labs.
• Comfortable making large, irreversible capital decisions under uncertainty.
• A strong capital-markets track record with sophisticated investors and boards.
• Deep command of unit economics, margin, and forecasting without false precision.
• An excellent communicator who makes complex economics legible to non-finance audiences.

Bonus: AI / compute / cloud infrastructure or semiconductor procurement; scaling a finance team through hypergrowth; time at a frontier lab, neocloud, or hyperscaler.

This is a rare 0→1 seat at one of the most compute-intensive companies being built today. If you want to build the financial engine of a category-defining AI business, let's talk.