Strategic Finance Lead

At Sierra, we’re creating a platform to help businesses build better, more human customer experiences with AI. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices in Atlanta, New York, London, Paris, Madrid, Munich, Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney.

We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do.

Our co-founders are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace. 

As the Strategic Finance Lead, you'll drive key processes that help translate Sierra’s strategy into a financial plan and measure performance against it. Build and maintain forecasts, budgets, and models that help leaders understand where the business is, where it's going, and what tradeoffs they face. This is a high-ownership IC role for a builder who is energized by ambiguity and wants their fingerprints on how a high-growth AI company understands and drives its business.

• Planning and Forecasting: Develop and drive key components of our financial planning and forecasting processes (e.g., revenue, cost of sales, GTM, R&D, capex and IDSW). Collaborate closely with Corporate FP&A to ensure revenue and cost forecasts integrate cleanly into the consolidated financial plan, board reporting, and budget vs. actuals (BvA) packages.

• Performance Insights and Business Partnership: Support the monthly and quarterly close cycle from an FP&A perspective, including BvA and variance commentary. Develop and track the unit economics framework: LTV, CAC, CAC payback, LTV:CAC, and contribution margin by segment. Deliver actionable insights by connecting revenue, cost, and unit economic trends into a coherent view of business performance.

• Data Infrastructure and Process: Build and own the data pipelines and reporting frameworks that underpin revenue and cost analytics, working with the appropriate teams to ensure clean, reliable inputs. Develop repeatable processes, templates, and documentation for all owned workstreams, with a bias toward automation and an AI-native approach to financial operations

• Cross Functional Partnership: Drive cross-functional alignment on goals, building stakeholder buy-in, and enabling effective decision-making and execution across the organization.

• 8+ years of total experience, including meaningful time in a Strategic Finance, FP&A, or investment role at a high-growth technology company, and exposure to investment banking, private equity, venture capital, or an equivalent analytical finance environment

• Deep fluency in SaaS and ARR-based business models: you can build a bottoms-up ARR bridge, decompose NRR into its drivers, model cohort retention, and explain the unit economics of an enterprise software business.

• Direct experience building revenue models and customer analytics datasets in a SaaS or cloud business, including customer-level or segment-level ARR analysis.

• Exceptional financial modeling skills, with the ability to build complex, multi-driver models from scratch in Google Sheets, including scenario frameworks, sensitivity analysis, and dynamic forecast structures.

• Strong business partnership skills: you can sit in a room with leaders across the business from Engineering to GTM, understand what they are trying to accomplish, and translate it into a financial framework that improves their decision-making.

• Proficiency in BI and data tools such as Hex, Omni, Looker, and SQL, with the ability to pull and validate data independently.

• A structured, self-directed, detail-oriented builder and problem solver who can design a process where none exists, run it, and improve it over time without being managed toward it. A bias for simplifying and automating processes and passion for building an AI-native finance function.

• Degree in finance, economics, accounting, STEM, or equivalent professional experience.

• Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work.

• Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it.

• Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self-reflect to continuously self-improve.

• Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.

• Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements.

We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees:

• Flexible (unlimited) paid time off

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family

• Life insurance and disability benefits

• Retirement plan dependent on country of employment

• Parental leave

• Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot

• Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized 

• Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most

• Free alphorn lessons

These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.

We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.