The Director of FP&A, R&D acts as the strategic finance partner to Engineering, Product, and Data/ML leadership, owning the R&D operating plan and establishing LLM economics as a fundamental financial discipline. This role manages the P&L for R&D headcount and Cost of Revenue (CoR) for AI in production, driving efficiency through direct engagement with our data stack (BigQuery/dbt).
What You'll Do- Partner day to day with engineering, product, and data leaders as their trusted finance counterpart.
- Build the analyses that shape build-vs-buy, pricing, and infrastructure decisions.
- Support foundation-model and cloud vendor negotiations with data-backed positions.
- Deliver clear, concise reporting and variance commentary to the CFO, FP&A leadership, and the board.
- Own the R&D budget, forecast, and headcount plan across Engineering, Product, and Data/ML. Drive the re-forecast cycle and keep hiring plans tied to output and priorities.
- Make LLM/inference and cloud compute cost a first-class, closely monitored metric. Build the model that tracks unit costs; monitor spend daily; and partner with engineering to find and defend efficiency. This is not a monthly-close afterthought, it's a core operating metric of the business.
- Own the connection between usage, inference cost, and gross margin. Model the margin impact of new products, pricing changes, and model/infrastructure choices, and make the tradeoffs legible to leadership.
- Bring financial rigor to major R&D spend decisions including foundation-model and API contracts, cloud commitments, data, and dev tooling, including negotiation support and ROI cases.
What We Look For- 8+ years in FP&A / corporate finance, with meaningful time supporting R&D, Engineering, or a technical/product org.
- Deep comfort with SaaS and AI/usage-based economics: CoR, gross margin, unit economics, and how infrastructure/inference cost drives them.
- Strong SQL (BigQuery a major plus) and expert Excel/Sheets modeling, with clean, maintainable model architecture.
- Strong grasp of how R&D spend flows through the P&L.
- Ability to be a genuine partner to technical leaders, holding substantive conversations with engineering or ML leads to translate technical work into financial views.
- Precise, low-ego, self-directed, and concise work ethic.
- Nice to have: Experience at a high-growth AI/ML company, familiarity with modern data stacks, contract negotiation experience, people management experience, and CPA/CA/CFA.
- Nice to have: Familiarity with a modern data stack (dbt, EPMs) and building repeatable, auditable finance pipelines.
Benefits & Perks:As part of our total rewards package, we offer attractive benefits and perks to our employees, including:
- Choice of medical, dental, and vision insurance plans for you and your family.
- Additional insurance coverage options for life, accident, or critical illness.
- Flexible paid time off, sick leave, short-term and long-term disability.
- 10 US observed holidays, and Canadian statutory holidays by province.
- A home office stipend.
- 401(k) for US-based employees and RRSP for Canada-based employees.
- Paid parental leave.
- A local in-person meet-up program.
- Hubs in San Francisco and Toronto.
Please note the above benefits & perks are for full-time employees
