Financial Director - Frontier AI

Director / Senior Director, Strategic Finance — Frontier AI

On offer: $300K - $350K base salary, bonus, and equity. Palo Alto, Hybrid. Ownership of the most important number at one of the most ambitious labs in the world.

Compute is the bet that makes or breaks a frontier lab. We want you to own it.

We're building general-purpose world models — causal, interactive, real-time simulations. Compute is our lifeblood and our single largest, most consequential decision. Get it right, and we stay at the frontier. Get it wrong in either direction, and it's existential: overcommit and we burn through the balance sheet; undercommit and we can't serve customers or keep up. There is no neutral call here — and we're hiring the person who makes it.

You'll own the financial engine of a business growing on an exponential, hard-to-predict curve, and build the finance function around the hardest question in AI economics: how much compute, when, and at what risk. You'll model a future no spreadsheet can pin to a single number, then make that future legible and fundable to investors and the board. This is strategy, not reporting — a seat right underneath leadership where your judgment moves the company.

What you'll do

• Own compute procurement and the allocation of capacity between training and customer demand — the company's primary capital deployment decision.
• Size multi-year, large-scale commitments and hold the line between frontier ambition and balance-sheet reality.
• Build the models that plan across a cone of uncertainty instead of pretending to a single forecast.
• Own gross margin and the unit economics of training and serving models, and shape how that flows into pricing.
• Build the capital narrative and diligence behind raises, and help carry investor, partner, and board relationships.

Who you are

• Senior strategic-finance / CFO-track operator from a capital-intensive, high-growth, or infrastructure-heavy world — banks, hyperscalers, neoclouds, or labs.
• Someone who's made large, irreversible calls under deep uncertainty and can defend the logic.
• Capital markets are credible, with the scars of raising real money from sophisticated investors and boards.
• Fluent in unit economics, margin, and exponential modelling — without anchoring to false precision.
• A communicator who can make complex economics land in two minutes.
• A builder with high agency who'd rather rebuild finance around AI than hire ten analysts.