R&D Finance Lead

Posted Yesterday
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2 Locations
In-Office
Expert/Leader
Artificial Intelligence • Information Technology
The Role
Own finance for the R&D organization, modeling compute, training, inference, infrastructure, headcount, budgets, vendor commitments, and unit economics. Partner with engineering, research, procurement, accounting, and company leadership to forecast costs, evaluate build-versus-buy decisions, negotiate vendors, assess capitalization, and improve gross margin and infrastructure efficiency.
Summary Generated by Built In
About us

Parallel is a web infrastructure company. Our products are used by leading businesses in sales, marketing, insurance, and coding to build best-in-class AI agents with flexible and powerful programmatic access to the web.

We've raised $230 million from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, First Round, and Terrain to build the web for AIs. We're currently valued at $2 billion and we're forming a world-class team of engineers, designers, marketers, sellers, researchers, and operational experts to achieve our mission.

Job: You will own finance for Parallel’s research and engineering organization, where most of our spend goes. You’ll build the model for compute, our largest and fastest-moving cost, tracking training, inference, and infrastructure spend against commitments and usage, and you’ll forecast where it’s headed as the product scales. You’ll partner directly with engineering and research leadership on headcount plans, budgets, and the tradeoffs between building, buying, and spending more compute. You’ll work with procurement on compute and vendor negotiations, and with accounting on how R&D costs get treated and capitalized. You’ll turn cost per query, gross margin, and infrastructure efficiency into clear recommendations, and you’ll make sure the founding team knows what every major technical bet costs before they make it.

You: You’ve owned finance for an engineering or infrastructure organization at a high-growth tech company, ideally one where compute or cloud was a top cost line. You understand reserved versus on-demand pricing, GPU commitments, and how utilization drives unit economics. You can sit with engineers, understand what they’re building, and turn it into a cost model they trust. You came up through a high-rigor environment and since then have worked where the data is messy and the process doesn’t exist yet. You’ve told a technical leader their plan was too expensive and helped them find a cheaper way to get there. You use AI tools to do real work, and you’d rather build the function than inherit it.

Life at Parallel

Our team works fully in-person, between our Palo Alto HQ and San Francisco office. We’re a flat, talent-dense organization dedicated to solving technical and creative problems.

We seek like-minded individuals who share our passion for applying science, creativity, and consistency to big and complex problems with equally big outcomes. These are our values:

  • Own customer impact: It’s on us to ensure real-world outcomes for our customers.

  • Obsess over craft: Perfect every detail because quality compounds.

  • Accelerate change: Ship fast, adapt faster, and move frontier ideas into production.

  • Create win-wins: Creatively turn trade-offs into upside.

  • Make high-conviction bets: Try and fail. But succeed an unfair amount.

Compensation & benefits
  • Competitive salary

  • Generous equity

  • Visa sponsorships

  • 401K plans

  • Daily lunch & office snacks

  • Dinner at the office

  • Unlimited vacation

  • Caltrain pass reimbursement

Skills Required

  • Prior ownership of finance for an engineering or infrastructure organization at a high-growth technology company
  • Experience with compute or cloud infrastructure as a major cost category
  • Understanding of reserved versus on-demand pricing, GPU commitments, and utilization-driven unit economics
  • Ability to partner effectively with engineers and translate technical plans into trusted cost models
  • Experience building finance processes in a high-growth, high-rigor, ambiguous environment
  • Experience challenging expensive technical plans and identifying lower-cost alternatives
  • Experience with headcount planning, budgeting, vendor negotiations, and R&D cost capitalization
  • Experience using AI tools for finance work

Parallel Web Systems Compensation & Benefits Highlights

The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Parallel Web Systems and has not been reviewed or approved by Parallel Web Systems.

  • Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity is prominently advertised as “generous” across roles, paired with competitive base pay. A reported ML Engineer package including substantial stock indicates equity is a meaningful component.
  • Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — Daily lunch, snacks, and dinner are provided, with Caltrain pass reimbursement supporting commuters. In‑person offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco enable these onsite perks.
  • Retirement Support — A 401(k) plan is explicitly listed on multiple job postings. This establishes a baseline layer of retirement support alongside cash and equity.

Parallel Web Systems Insights

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The Company
HQ: Palo Alto, California
23 Employees

What We Do

At Parallel Web Systems, we are bringing a new web to life: it’s built with, by, and for AIs. Our work spans innovations across crawling, indexing, ranking, retrieval, and reasoning systems. Our first product is a set of API for AIs to do more with web data.

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