Financial Audit Consultant

Engagement: 2 weeks · 8 hours/week

Compensation: Competitive hourly rate

Location: Palo Alto, CA

The Opportunity

We are building an AI-native platform for financial statement audit — one where an AI agent reads an audit workpaper, identifies the relevant assertions, evaluates evidence quality, flags potential misstatements, and generates GAAS-defensible documentation. Automatically.

The engineering is working. What it needs now is an expert who can tell us when it's right and when it only looks right.

This is not a training role. This is not a data labeling role. This is the role where a seasoned financial auditor looks at what the AI produced, applies the kind of judgment that comes from years of real engagements, and tells us exactly where professional standards would push back — and why.

Your input directly shapes how AI handles financial audit for public and private companies. That influence starts on day one.

What You'll Do:

Review AI-generated workpaper interpretations against real audit standards.

The system parses uploaded audit workpapers and makes decisions: which procedures address which assertions, what constitutes sufficient appropriate evidence, and where a potential misstatement exists. You will tell us when those decisions are audit-defensible and when they are not.

Define ground truth across account types and audit areas.

Revenue recognition, accounts receivable confirmations, inventory observations, debt covenants, management estimates, related-party disclosures — each behaves differently under AU-C standards. You will tell us what a correct result looks like for each, and provide real workpaper examples where possible.

Challenge the AI's risk and exception logic.

When the system identifies a transaction as potentially misstated, is it? When it concludes that substantive procedures are sufficient without further testing, should it? You provide the professional judgment the engineering team cannot.

Shape the product roadmap.

You will identify gaps between what auditors actually need and what the system currently produces. Those gaps become the next build cycle.

Who this is for

• You have 5 years of hands-on financial audit experience, including direct workpaper preparation and review — not just oversight.
• You know what a peer reviewer or regulator looks for because you have been in that room.
• You came up through a Big 4 or equivalent top-tier firm (EY, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, or a national practice with equivalent audit depth).
• You hold a CPA and have worked across multiple clients and industry verticals, not just one sector.
• You are intellectually curious about what AI gets wrong — not defensive about it.
• You see the potential for AI in audit and want to be part of getting it right from the beginning, before the standards catch up.

Minimum qualifications

• 5 years of financial statement audit experience, hands-on
• Big 4 or equivalent top-tier firm background required
• Deep working knowledge of GAAS, AU-C standards, and PCAOB where applicable
• CPA certification required
• Experience spanning multiple audit areas and account types, not single-domain

Preferred

• Experience leading audit engagements for mid-to-large cap public or private companies
• Former senior associate or manager level — you reviewed others' workpapers
• Exposure to audit analytics, data-driven testing, or audit technology platforms
• Intellectual interest in where AI belongs — and doesn't belong — in regulated workflows