Chief Financial Officer

Chief Financial Officer

About Neato

The Neato Company is a Las Vegas-based 2P eCommerce accelerator. We purchase inventory from mid-market CPG brands, serve as their exclusive Amazon seller of record, and bundle a full-stack agency of creative, advertising, supply chain, data, and brand protection at no cost to the brand. As a brand partner, we have skin in the game. We make money when our partners win, and only then.

Neato has approximately 90 people and is Series A-backed by Advantage Capital. The CFO seat is one of the founding C-suite hires we are making now to institutionalize the company at the leadership layer so the founders can step out of the day-to-day to focus their time and effort upstream.

The Opportunity

The Chief Financial Officer at Neato is one of the most consequential seats on the executive team. You are Neato's first true head of finance, second-in-command behind the founders, and the operator who builds Neato into a financially disciplined, strategically optionable company - one that can pursue M&A, financing, or strategic transactions on its own terms when the moment is right.

You inherit a finance function that has run for six years on the two founders, a fractional controller, and a part-time bookkeeper. The books are detailed, granular, and audited annually by a major firm. They are in a solid place. But there is no finance function underneath them. No FP&A, no scenario planning, no formal budgeting. RAMP runs expenses and treasury but is underused. QuickBooks Online stays. Several core tools - the WMS/IMS, inventory forecasting, the brand-profitability model used in deal negotiations - are proprietary, and will need to be inherited, owned, and documented. There is no finance team to inherit. You build from scratch.

Neato's economics are working-capital intensive. We take inventory risk on every brand we sign, our cash sits tied up in Amazon settlement cycles, and our brand-profitability model is the engine that decides which deals get done. The CFO does not advise on these dynamics. The CFO owns them.

You report directly to the founders and serve as second-in-command across the executive team alongside the CTO, CCO, COO, and CBO.

You Are…

The thesis of this seat is institutional financial leadership built on a foundation you construct yourself. The pillars below describe the financial mind we are looking for. Each item is a behavioral filter. In interviews, expect to be asked for a specific, named example.

Builder-Forward Characteristics

• You have built or been part of the build of a finance function from zero within a start-up through venture/PE. Not inherited one.
• You have rebuilt a founder-led company model in a way the founder can still recognize, and made it scale.
• You have stood up an FP&A function - budget, forecast, scenario, variance reporting, board pack - inside a company. You can describe the cadence and the artifacts.
• You have implemented expense policy, AP discipline, and budget ownership at a company. You did it without making people hate finance.
• You have made the build-versus-buy call on finance tooling - financial planning systems, AI agents, automation - and you know when QuickBooks plus discipline beats a six-figure platform.
• You document obsessively. You know institutional memory in finance is a liability when it lives in one head.

Transaction-Forward Characteristics

• You have personally led M&A, recapitalization, financing, or material strategic transactions on the company side.
• You have managed investment bankers as a customer, not a peer. You have an opinion about which banks fit which processes, and you know how to choose one.
• You have built financial narratives that justified valuations and defended them under hostile diligence. You can describe the three numbers you knew would get pulled apart and how you prepared for them.
• You have prepared a company for strategic alternatives - clean QofE, defensible adjusted EBITDA, normalized working capital, a scrubbed cap table, and an audit trail that withstands legal scrutiny.
• You understand the difference between maximizing valuation and maximizing the owner outcome, and you advise candidly when they diverge.
• You are comfortable carrying a transaction calendar in parallel with the day job for the duration of a process.

Strategic-Finance Characteristics

• You think like a founder about every dollar - where it comes from, what it costs, what it could be doing instead.
• You read working capital like a CEO. You know the connection between an inventory underwriting decision today, a settlement cycle next month, and a quarterly cash position.
• You have modeled brand profitability, customer profitability, or unit economics at a level the operating team actually uses to make decisions.
• You can join a commercial conversation with the Chief Commercial Officer and contribute to it. You can sit in an operational conversation with the COO and add to it. You do not retreat to the finance lane.
• You see adjacent monetization, pricing, and capital structure moves the rest of the executive team misses, and you bring them forward.
• You have killed a financial program - a tool, a process, a hire, a forecast methodology - that was not working. You do not keep things alive because you owned them.

Leadership Style

• You operate as second in command. You can be left in charge for a week, and the company keeps running.
• You write clearly. You can put a board memo, a diligence response, a forecast, or a strategic recommendation into a one-page document without help.
• You hire people better than you in narrow domains, and you do not feel threatened by them.
• You hold people accountable directly and without drama. You have terminated underperformers, and you can describe the conversation.
• You operate AI-natively. You do not delegate AI to a junior or wait for the CTO to push it on you. You use it daily across financial modeling, close, FP&A, and IR, and you expect your team to do the same.
• You manage up cleanly. You bring the founders the decisions they need to weigh in on, one or two dashboards that tell them where the company stands, and the discipline to keep everything else off their plate.

Core Responsibilities

• Lead M&A, financing, and strategic transaction activity for the company, including diligence preparation, banker management, valuation work, and deal execution.
• Build the Finance function from the ground up, including FP&A, accounting, treasury, AP/AR, payroll, procurement, tax, and equity administration using AI agents + select people.
• Hire and lead the finance team, beginning with a senior accountant inside the first 90 days, followed by a finance associate.
• Own the company-level financial plan - budget, forecast, scenario planning, and the model that drives operating decisions.
• Own treasury, cash management, and working capital strategy, with a particular focus on inventory underwriting and Amazon settlement cycles.
• Partner with the COO on inventory underwriting and brand-level working capital exposure.
• Partner with the CCO on pricing, packaging, brand profitability modeling, and commercial deal economics.
• Own audit, tax, and external partner management, including the relationship with the company's current audit firm.
• Own investor relations and board reporting, including board materials, investor updates, and existing institutional relationships.
• Operate as second in command across the executive team, partnering with the CTO, CCO, COO, and CBO on cross-functional decisions.
• Bring AI and agent-based workflows into the finance function as a force multiplier on the team you build.

Required Experience

• 5+ years of progressive financial leadership, including at least one