Director of Strategic Finance

The short version

Nift is a profitable, roughly 60-person company with $50M+ in annual revenue, and our finance function hasn't caught up to the business yet. We're hiring our first Director of Strategic Finance to own planning and forecasting end to end, and to rebuild how finance gets its numbers.

That second part matters. Today, too much of our finance work runs through spreadsheets, manual uploads, and vendor-by-vendor cleanup. You'll have an engineering partner, budget for tools, and a Head of Finance who wants to review your model, not build it. If you write your own SQL, think in three statements, and get a kick out of replacing a manual process with one that runs itself, keep reading.

This is a director role on purpose. It's built for a strong senior manager or director who wants full ownership and more headroom, not a large team to delegate to.

What you'll own

The job has three parts, in this order of priority.

• Planning and forecasting, end to end
• Run the annual operating plan. Build the departmental OpEx and headcount templates, walk each leader through them, and turn their inputs into one driver-based plan.
• Own the operating model: revenue, gross profit, OpEx, headcount, EBITDA, working capital, and cash, plus a 3 to 5-year long-range plan.
• Reforecast on a regular cadence and run monthly budget-vs-actual reviews with department heads, so we know where every team is pacing before the quarter ends.
• Own short- and long-term cash flow forecasting, including collections and payment timing.
• Build the monthly reporting package and the Board materials with the Head of Finance. When the Board asks why R&D spend is under plan, you have the answer and the story behind it (for example, hires landing later than planned).
• Finance systems, automation, and process
• Lead the move from spreadsheet-driven finance operations to automated, system-to-system workflows. Current examples: connecting our database to our invoicing platform via API, and automating partner payout calculations into payables.
• Partner with an engineer on the product team: write the requirements, define the logic, check the numbers, and run user acceptance testing until it works the way finance needs it to.
• Define how the general ledger should be structured so leadership gets the cost visibility it needs (by team, function, and initiative, not just broad class), then work with accounting on the cleanup and on keeping new entries coded correctly.
• Evaluate and select finance tools, such as a planning platform, where they earn their keep.
• Use AI where it actually saves time: variance commentary, data validation, recurring reporting.
• Analysis that drives decisions
• Measure payback on our sales investment by team (enterprise and mid-market) in months, not adjectives.
• Build advertiser and partner cohort, retention, and spend-distribution analysis by segment.
• Turn open-ended questions into a clear point of view. "Is this campaign working?" "Model this new business line." "Show investors our partners are sticky." You decide the right methodology (for example, when a short pilot should be excluded from retention), document it, and tell the story the data supports.
• Write your own SQL against our production data (read access) and your own finance schema. No waiting on a data team for a pull.

Your first year

First 90 days: take ownership of the operating model and the annual plan, run your first monthly close review with accounting, and deliver your first reporting package and Board pack.

By month 6: a driver-based plan and rolling forecast that leaders actually use to make decisions. A monthly cadence where the books close on a predictable timeline and variances are explained, not just reported. At least one manual workflow (invoicing or partner payouts) running system to system.

By month 12: cash forecasting you trust, a ledger structure that answers "what does this team cost?" without manual rework, sales payback and cohort analysis on a regular rhythm, and a finance function that runs without the Head of Finance doing the day-to-day.

Must-haves

• 7+ years in FP&A or strategic finance. Investment banking or transaction advisory works too, as long as you've since owned planning and forecasting in an operating company.
• Strong, hands-on SQL. You query, join, and reconcile messy data yourself. Using AI to write queries is great; it doesn't replace knowing what the query should do.
• Full ownership of a P&L's planning, either at a smaller company or for a division that ran like its own business. You've owned the whole model, not one line of it.
• Mastery of the three statements and how the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow connect.
• A track record of building something in finance that didn't exist before: a process, a model, a reporting pipeline, or an automation.
• The ability to turn analysis into a clear recommendation for a CEO or a Board.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in performance marketing, adtech, martech, ecommerce, consumer, SaaS, or another data-heavy, variable-cost business.
• Cohort, retention, LTV, and unit economics work.
• Exposure to finance systems projects: invoicing, payables, planning tools, or an ERP rollout, including working with engineers and running UAT.
• Board reporting or investor materials.

Additional information

What doesn't matter: your degree or where you went to school. A philosophy major with a decade of great FP&A work is a strong candidate.

Is this for you?

We'd rather be upfront than oversell it.

This role is not

• Accounting. Our accounting team runs the close, AP/AR, payroll, and the audit relationship. You'll partner with them on close reviews, audit schedules, and data quality, but you won't run the books.
• A deal job. We're profitable and not raising right now, and there's little M&A. You'll support the Board and investors, but if you want a steady diet of transaction modeling, this isn't it.
• A role with a team underneath you on day one. You'll build and run the work yourself. A team may come as the function grows.

You'll love it here if: you see a messy, manual process and want to be the one who fixes it. You'd rather be handed a blank page ("build the business case") than a checklist. And you're excited, not annoyed, that some of the basics still need to be built.

It probably isn't a fit if: you're used to directing a team and want to keep doing that, or you'd see this title as a step sideways.