Strategic Finance Lead

Tolan

$130K — $180K *
Finance & Insurance
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5 years of financial experience in a tech company or investment banking.
  • Proficient in building financial models accurately and efficiently.
  • Strong analytical skills with the ability to simplify complex data.
  • Experience collaborating closely with C-level executives.
  • Familiarity with AI tools and applications in finance.

Responsibilities

  • Build and manage core financial models including revenue and unit economics.
  • Ensure accuracy in financial reporting for founder reliance.
  • Define key performance indicators and create dashboards for tracking.
  • Collaborate with founders to prioritize goals and allocate resources effectively.
  • Provide strategic data-driven recommendations to various departments.
  • Establish finance processes and reporting systems from scratch.
  • Conduct in-depth analysis to support fundraising efforts.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to shape the finance function from the ground up.
  • Direct collaboration with the CEO and founders.
  • Chance to leverage AI in financial strategies.
  • Competitive salary and equity options.
  • On-site work environment in San Francisco.
Full Job Description
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

Own the numbers
  • Build and own Tolan's core financial and operating models: revenue, unit economics, burn, runway, and scenarios.
  • Keep a high bar for accuracy so the founders can rely on the numbers.
  • Define the KPIs that matter for a consumer AI product and build the dashboards to track them.

Drive the decisions
  • Work directly with the founders to set goals, weigh tradeoffs, and decide where to put time and money.
  • Act as a strategic partner to product, growth, research and operations leaders, helping them make better decisions.
  • Translate data into clear recommendations and surface insights proactively.

Build the function
  • Stand up the finance processes, systems, and reporting a company our size needs, from scratch.
  • Support long-term fundraising and other strategic moments with diligence-ready analysis.
  • Build the finance function around AI from the start..
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 or a similar field out of college, learning to build hyper-accurate models, then an in-house role at a scaling tech company, with real ownership and enough complexity to make the work matter. All told, this could be ~5 years of experience. That's one route in, but 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 have a strong academic background.

You're AI-curious or AI-native. You already reach for AI to work faster, and 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
  • Compensation: competitive salary and meaningful equity, set to experience.
  • Reports to: CEO.

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