What are the responsibilities and job description for the Finance Operations & AI Automation Lead position at Crystal Practice Management?
About Crystal PM
Every day, over 10,000 eye care professionals log into Crystal’s software before they see their first patient. We're the operating system behind independent eyecare — the EHR, practice management, billing, scheduling, and payments platform that keeps these practices running smoothly.
With new leadership, fresh growth capital from top-tier software and search fund investors, and a clear runway to $35mm in ARR, Crystal is at an inflection point. We're not a startup – we're a market leader focused on long-term value creation. That means building the team, the product, and the go-to-market engine to execute on our ambitious goals.
We’re assembling a team that matches the opportunity. If that sounds like your kind of challenge, we'd like to hear from you.
About The Role
Crystal’s finance function is seeking someone who combines strong accounting fundamentals with a genuine curiosity about how AI and automation can make financial operations faster, more accurate, and less manual. Reporting directly to the VP of Finance, this position is ideal for someone who wants to grow beyond traditional accounting into finance operations, systems, automation, and long-term finance leadership. This is not a narrowly scoped accounting role —it’s an opportunity to help build and improve how the finance function operates.
You’ll work across the month-end close, billing, collections, and financial reporting. You’ll also own audit and tax compliance functions while taking on special projects that span departments: connecting systems that don’t talk to each other, building automated workflows where manual ones exist today, and exploring how AI tools can reduce repetitive work across the finance team. Crystal runs on applications like QuickBooks, Ramp, and Salesforce, and there’s meaningful opportunity to improve how data flows between them.
We’re not expecting you to walk in the door already building AI agents. We are expecting strong accounting skills, curiosity about technology, and the kind of mindset where you look at a manual process and immediately think about how to improve it. You’ll develop the systems and automation side of the role on the job, with support from a finance leader who believes this is where the profession is heading.
Who You Are
Every day, over 10,000 eye care professionals log into Crystal’s software before they see their first patient. We're the operating system behind independent eyecare — the EHR, practice management, billing, scheduling, and payments platform that keeps these practices running smoothly.
With new leadership, fresh growth capital from top-tier software and search fund investors, and a clear runway to $35mm in ARR, Crystal is at an inflection point. We're not a startup – we're a market leader focused on long-term value creation. That means building the team, the product, and the go-to-market engine to execute on our ambitious goals.
We’re assembling a team that matches the opportunity. If that sounds like your kind of challenge, we'd like to hear from you.
About The Role
Crystal’s finance function is seeking someone who combines strong accounting fundamentals with a genuine curiosity about how AI and automation can make financial operations faster, more accurate, and less manual. Reporting directly to the VP of Finance, this position is ideal for someone who wants to grow beyond traditional accounting into finance operations, systems, automation, and long-term finance leadership. This is not a narrowly scoped accounting role —it’s an opportunity to help build and improve how the finance function operates.
You’ll work across the month-end close, billing, collections, and financial reporting. You’ll also own audit and tax compliance functions while taking on special projects that span departments: connecting systems that don’t talk to each other, building automated workflows where manual ones exist today, and exploring how AI tools can reduce repetitive work across the finance team. Crystal runs on applications like QuickBooks, Ramp, and Salesforce, and there’s meaningful opportunity to improve how data flows between them.
We’re not expecting you to walk in the door already building AI agents. We are expecting strong accounting skills, curiosity about technology, and the kind of mindset where you look at a manual process and immediately think about how to improve it. You’ll develop the systems and automation side of the role on the job, with support from a finance leader who believes this is where the profession is heading.
Who You Are
- Accounting brain, engineering/systems instinct. You understand debits and credits, and be an engineer today, but you think like one when you look at a workflow.
- A builder. You likely come from an accounting, audit, or finance operations background in an environment with strong technical rigor, but are looking for something more entrepreneurial where you can build, improve systems, and operate with greater ownership.
- Curious and self-directed. You’re the kind of person who tries the new AI tool before anyone asks you to. You read about what other finance teams are building and you want to do the same. Learning is a habit, not an assignment.
- Detail-oriented with a systems lens. You catch the small errors that matter, and you also think about how to prevent them at the source rather than catching them every month.
- High agency. When you see something broken, you don’t wait for someone to assign it. You flag it, propose a fix, and move. You’re comfortable with ambiguity and prefer action over perfection.
- Dependable under pressure. Month-end close gets tight. Customer billing issues come in hot. You stay calm, deliver clean work, and keep commitments.
- 3-5 years of experience in audit, accounting, financial operations, or a finance-adjacent role. You have a solid understanding of the month-end close process, reconciliations, journal entries, and GAAP fundamentals.
- Hands-on experience with QuickBooks, Ramp, and/or Salesforce preferred. Familiarity with how these systems work and where they fall short is more valuable than certification.
- Genuine curiosity about AI and automation tools. You don’t need to have built production agents, but you should be someone who is actively experimenting: testing new tools, watching what’s possible, and thinking about how it applies to your work.
- Comfort learning new technical skills on the job. Whether it’s connecting systems through APIs, using AI coding tools, or building workflows in AI tooling, you’re willing to figure it out.
- Strong attention to detail and a track record of clean, reliable work product. Finance moves fast here, and accuracy is non-negotiable.
- Team lead or coordination experience is a plus. Even informal leadership counts if you can point to a time you organized work across people and held them accountable.
- SaaS or healthcare technology experience is a strong plus but not required.
- You’ve learned Crystal’s close process, billing infrastructure, and system landscape, and you’re owning the month-end close. You’re not just executing tasks handed to you. You’re spotting inefficiencies and bringing ideas for how to improve them.
- You’ve mapped how data flows between QuickBooks, Ramp, and Salesforce and identified the manual handoffs that slow things down. You’ve started replacing at least a few of them with automated workflows.
- You’ve started experimenting with AI tools to automate recurring finance tasks. Maybe it’s transaction categorization, maybe it’s a reconciliation that runs itself, maybe it’s a collections follow-up sequence. The specific build matters less than the pattern: you see a manual process and your instinct is to make it run on its own.
- You’ve taken ownership of audit and tax compliance. You’re managing the annual financial statement audit, preparing monthly and quarterly sales tax returns, and liaising with the external tax team to ensure timely filing of taxes. These are compliance functions that require precision and follow-through, and you handle them without reminders.
- The VP of Finance trusts your work. Your numbers are clean, your documentation is solid, and you’re becoming the person people come to when they want to understand how something in the financial operations stack works.
- Competitive compensation based on experience
- Health, dental and vision benefits
- Hybrid work flexibility with regular in-office collaboration in Austin; this is a cross-functional role with a strong in-person component as someone gets up to speed.
- 401(k) with matching company contribution
- Flexible PTO policy
- Ground-floor opportunity in a well-funded, fast-growing healthcare technology company