Strategic Finance Manager, R&D

TRM’s Strategic Finance team is the financial engine room for how the company invests in building its products, and this role is the dedicated finance partner for that R&D investment. You will own the modeling of R&D spend, from cloud infrastructure to AI and compute costs to engineering headcount, and translate it into decisions that keep R&D scaling efficiently relative to revenue. Because TRM’s product is built on heavy cloud and AI infrastructure, this seat sits at the center of one of the company’s fastest-growing and most consequential cost centers.

The impact you will have:

• Keep R&D spend scaling efficiently against revenue by owning the cloud infrastructure and AI/compute cost models, using BigQuery and AI-assisted analysis to turn raw billing data into variance readouts leadership can act on within days of month-end.
• Give the CTO and engineering leaders a live view of headcount capacity by building scenario models in Pigment and TRM’s Claude-powered scenario engine, so hiring ramps can be compared and decided in hours rather than reworked over days.
• Reduce the time R&D finance reporting takes to produce by extending TRM’s board-deck automation, which refreshes executive and board materials directly from governed named ranges, so you spend your time on analysis instead of assembly.
• Partner with the Head of AI to optimize AI and infrastructure spend, surfacing the build-vs-buy and efficiency opportunities that protect margins as usage grows.

What we’re looking for:

• 5 to 8 years across investment banking, investing, consulting, or finance at a high-growth technology company, with a track record of owning monthly, quarterly, and annual planning and reporting cycles end-to-end with limited guidance.
• Hands-on fluency using AI tools in real finance work: you have used tools like Claude or ChatGPT to accelerate modeling and analysis, and can judge when to trust their output and when to override it.
• Expert-level Excel and Google Sheets modeling, plus experience building scalable, AI-assisted or agentic engines (for example in Pigment) that turn one-off analysis into repeatable reporting.
• Experience supporting technical or product organizations (Engineering, Product, Data Science, or Infrastructure) is strongly preferred, including partnering with them to bring structure and AI-driven analysis to fast-growing cloud and compute costs.

About the Team:

• Strategic Finance is a small, high-leverage team that works directly with senior leadership on forecasting, decision support, and company-wide strategy, led by operators from high-growth startups, private equity, and consulting.
• The team is distributed, not distant: people work across US time zones but operate as one tight group with a high bar for execution and fast, direct feedback.
• You will partner cross-functionally with the CTO, engineering and infrastructure leaders, Recruiting, and Accounting, acting as the finance point of contact for everything R&D.
• Decisions here are made with models, analytics, and clear narratives rather than opinion, and the team leans heavily on AI tooling to punch above its weight.

Team Operating Rhythms:

• A weekly Strategic Finance standup sets priorities and unblocks work, with a separate weekly sync with the VP of Finance to align on the trajectory of the business.
• Monthly and quarterly close drives the calendar, culminating in a one-page Monthly Business Review that goes to leadership and feeds board materials.
• Day-to-day collaboration is async-first in Slack, with synchronous time reserved for planning, scenario reviews, and cross-functional decisions.
• Planning cadences (monthly reforecasts, quarterly reviews, annual planning) are run end-to-end by the owner, with status and decisions communicated in writing.

Life at TRM We are building a safer world. That promise shows up in how we work every day. TRM moves quickly. We are a high velocity, high ownership team that expects clarity, follow-through, and impact. People who thrive here are energized by hard problems, experimentation, and continuous feedback. If something takes months elsewhere, it will ship here in days.