Strategic Finance

Posted 2 Days Ago
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San Francisco, CA
In-Office
200K-275K
Senior level
Software
The Role
Lead FP&A and strategic finance initiatives, collaborating with cross-functional teams to evaluate investments, manage costs, and support pricing decisions for growth.
Summary Generated by Built In
About the Role

Finance at Descript isn’t a back-office function — it’s a strategic partner in shaping where and how we grow. This role exists to turn insight into leverage: helping the company make smarter bets, allocate capital effectively, and improve the efficiency of how we operate. You’ll report to the VP of Finance and lead FP&A and strategic finance initiatives across the company, partnering closely with Sales, Product, and Engineering. Your work will influence everything from how we evaluate investments, manage compute and COGS, to how we support pricing and monetization decisions in our growing enterprise segment.

We’re looking for someone who sees finance as a creative craft — not just about control or compliance, but about clarity, curiosity, and action. You’ll build models, frameworks, and narratives that help Descript make better decisions faster. The right person thrives at the intersection of data, product, and strategy; is fluent in SQL or eager to learn it; and has the range to move from tactical detail to company-level strategy.

What will you do?

  • Lead FP&A — own company-wide planning, forecasting, and performance management. Build dashboards that surface tradeoffs and guide executive decisions
  • Partner with Sales and Product to evaluate commercial opportunities, improve efficiency, and support revenue growth in the enterprise segment
  • Evaluate areas of growth and investment by analyzing TAM, unit economics, and ROI across products and customer segments
  • Collaborate with Product and Engineering to monitor COGS and compute and inference costs, identify efficiency opportunities, and help drive improvements in gross margin
  • Partner with Product, Engineering, and Ops to structure enterprise pricing and monetization experiments
  • Build clear, data-driven narratives for board and investor updates, and support fundraising efforts with modeling, materials, and financial storytelling.
  • Influence resourcing decisions: where to invest time, headcount and capital

What you bring:

  • 7+ years in finance roles at high-growth tech companies
  • Early training in consulting or investment banking
  • Experience leading FP&A or strategic finance, ideally scaling from <$50M to $200m+ ARR
  • Strong modeling, analytical rigor, and ability to influence
  • Cross-functional fluency with Product, Engineering, and GTM teams — able to translate financial insights into product and operational decisions
  • Deep understanding of SaaS sales economics and pipeline dynamics
  • Experience with monetization experiments, pricing, and packaging
  • Hands-on understanding of cloud and compute economics, with experience optimizing COGS and driving cost efficiency
  • Comfortable working with data directly — proficiency in SQL or a strong desire to learn
  • Excellent storytelling skills with data
  • Thrives in ambiguity, rapid iteration, and cross-functional collaboration

If you don’t tick every box above, we’d still encourage you to apply. We’re building a diverse team whose skills balance and complement one another.

The base salary range for this role is $200,000 - $275,000/year. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, and location, and may vary from the amount above.

About Descript

Descript is building a simple, intuitive, fully-powered editing tool for video and audio — an editing tool built for the age of AI. We are a team of 150 and the backing of some of the world's greatest investors (OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital). 

Descript is the special company that's in possession of both product market fit and the raw materials (passionate user community, great product, large market) for growth, but is still early enough that each new employee has a measurable influence on the direction of the company.

Benefits include a generous healthcare package, 401k matching program, catered lunches, and flexible vacation time. Our headquarters are located in the Mission District of San Francisco, CA. We're hiring for a mix of remote roles and hybrid roles.  For those who are remote, we have a handful of opportunities throughout the year for in person collaboration.  For our hybrid roles, we're flexible, and you're an adult—we don't expect or mandate that you're in the office every day. We do believe there are valuable and serendipitous moments of discovery and collaboration that come from working together in person. 

Descript is an equal opportunity workplace—we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status. We believe in actively building a team rich in diverse backgrounds, experiences, and opinions to better allow our employees, products, and community to thrive. 

Top Skills

SQL
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The Company
HQ: San Francisco, CA
90 Employees
Year Founded: 2017

What We Do

Descript builds simple and powerful collaborative tools for new media creators. We strive to eliminate the tedious work that often stands between an idea and its expression, so that creators can focus on developing their craft instead of their usage of tools.

Descript is a next generation digital media platform that offers a new "engine"​ that lets you edit audio by editing text (instead of waveforms).

That means it does transcription (both automated and human-powered, whichever you prefer), but more interestingly, it lets you move the audio around by simply editing the transcript.

If you're new to editing audio, you'll find it far easier - it's basically like using a word processor. If you're experienced, Descript is faster than waveform editing - and more fun.

If you work with voice audio (as opposed to music), Descript is what the future looks like...join us and change the world.

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