Founding Strategic Finance Lead

The role This is Tolan’s first dedicated finance hire. You’ll build the financial backbone of the company from scratch and work directly with the CEO on the decisions that determine how we grow. You’ll help determine where we invest, how aggressively we grow, and how we build a durable consumer AI business. You’ll drive the finance work end to end, from forecasting and planning through board and investor reporting, and you’ll use AI to drive more impact than a much larger team. What you’ll do Build and own Tolan's core financial and operating models. Report to the board and founders on an ongoing basis. Own our most important vendor relationships and negotiate the contracts that matter most, including the trillions of tokens of AI spend that power the product. Own pricing and margin strategy, in close partnership with the growth team. Evolve the core finance processes, systems, and reporting a company our size needs, building on a strong foundation built by our accounting team. Support long‑term fundraising and other strategic moments with diligence‑ready analysis. Who you are You've built real financial judgment somewhere it counted. For a lot of people that looks like a few years in investment banking and private equity, then an in‑house role at a scaling tech company, with real ownership and enough complexity to make the work matter. All told, this is often around 5 years of experience, give or take. That's one route in, not the only one. You take an ambiguous question, find the answer, and drive it to a decision with little oversight. You can make a complex analysis clear to people who don’t work in spreadsheets. You think rigorously and your work holds up to scrutiny. You've radically changed how you work in the last six months, and you can point to specific moments on your own AI trajectory: the workflows you rebuilt, the things you can do now that you couldn’t before. You want to help define what a finance function looks like when it’s built around these tools from the start. Bonus points if you’ve worked at a consumer or AI company, if you’re comfortable in SQL or Python, or if you’ve built a finance function from zero. Compensation and logistics Location: Onsite in SF #J-18808-Ljbffr Tolans