Head of Operations and Finance in City of London

Work Type: In-office (no remote or hybrid)

Overview

We build AI technology for the heavy industries. We are a real-world AI company: our AI systems are in factories right now making billions of dollars of decisions per year. We are growing rapidly through the seed-series A stage, being on track to increase bookings 5x YoY. We aim to take most of our initial market (steelmaking) in the next two years while launching in new industries at the same time. We are a world-class product and engineering org: our engineers work directly with customers and across the whole technology stack to iterate quickly in a fun, high-trust, but intense environment.

Role

We are now looking for a world-class candidate to lead Operations and Finance. This is a critical role as we scale from a team of 20, aggressively expand in the US across multiple industries, and deploy our recent $10m funding round. Some of the things you will do:

• Continuously forecast our finances, reconcile them with performance, and use this to inform all major decision making including hiring and fundraising.
• Help with our complex capacity planning and staffing needs: how to staff simultaneous complex enterprise projects when the scale is growing constantly.
• Build and maintain a budget, and control our finances. This should not just be a routine practice but a strategic activity to reduce our costs without compromising our performance.
• Run the practicalities of payroll, compensation, contracts, probations, terminations.
• Play a key role in creating material for investors and interacting with them directly: reporting to current investors, board meetings, and pitching to future investors.
• Ensure our engineers are fully insured, have the right visas, and anything else they need to be successful.
• Administer our entities abroad (e.g. American company), handle complex international tax implications, international employees, and decide the best approach to all related matters.

Candidates

We are looking for a candidate who can run operations and finance without direction. You will already have experience doing most or all of the responsibilities at a similarly sized startup. In principle, we are open to a range of experience from just a couple of years up to many years, but your current job title might be finance manager, operations manager, VP, CFO or COO. You are extremely disciplined, and can be a steady hand under your own direction while our product and engineering org pivots very rapidly and often. You have a high mathematical aptitude so that you can model the business in spreadsheets and in your head. It’s not necessary but you might have studied economics, mathematics, or similar. You may also have some experience in investment banking or a similarly mathematical career track before pivoting to startups. It’s also useful but not necessary if you have experience building automations. Simple scripts etc to automate the manual ops and finance jobs or build dashboards.

For this role and all others, we are looking for people with the following attributes:

• Exceptional ability. Whether in work, school, side projects, or elsewhere, you will have demonstrated exceptional ability. We are open minded about the exact form this takes. Some examples we look for:

• You have played a key role in an early stage startup.
• You have won hackathons, music, sport, math or other competitions.
• You have an impressive side project, like a popular blog or open source library.

Apply

Email. Please include - in your CV or in the body of the email - a list of 3-5 things you have done that you are proud of and that are relevant to the attributes we are looking for. Where possible, please include links to your work, such as GitHub, YouTube, or portfolios. We will do two or more telephone screenings. At least one will be with the CEO. You will work on something real with the team.