Head of Finance in London

About Tortus

Tortus is building the AI clinician assistant for healthcare. Our technology takes the administrative weight off clinicians so they can spend more time with patients and less on paperwork, safely and accurately. We work with the NHS and leading hospitals. We are a small, ambitious team backed by top-tier investors. We are scaling quickly: growing revenue, entering new markets, and building the systems and people that let us do that well. This is the moment we bring in our first substantive senior finance hire, and you would be the person who owns it.

About the role

We are looking for our first Head of Finance to build and own the finance function as we scale through and beyond Series A. You will be the most senior finance person in the business as we transition from a fractional CFO, and become the trusted partner to the CEO and a genuine contributor to the leadership team; the person who gives the board confidence in our numbers and keeps our finances running cleanly as we grow. This is a hands-on, build-it role, not an inherit-it one. Today finance runs through a strong outsourced provider alongside a fractional CFO. You would own that relationship and get the best from it, bring the right work in-house over time, and put in place the processes and systems a scaling two-country business needs. Working through outsourcing, contracting and good tooling is how the role is designed to work, so that more of your time goes to the commercial and strategic finance that matters. Over time you would build a small team beneath you. You will bring the calm, pragmatic rigour that founders trust when the stakes are high.

What you will do

• Board, investor and leadership partnership
  • Act as a trusted financial partner to the CEO and leadership team, providing clear, timely insight to support fast decisions.
  • Own board and investor reporting: concise, investor-grade packs covering financials, KPIs, cash and strategic progress.
  • Translate complex financial information into straightforward narratives that build confidence with the board and investors.
  • Position finance for the next raise: clean numbers and defensible unit economics that investors understand, with the data room and diligence ready.
• Commercial finance and the revenue model
  • Partner with the commercial team on reliable, assumptions-led pipeline and revenue forecasting that reflects long public-sector sales cycles and an evolving revenue model.
  • Own the definitions that matter as our pricing evolves: ARR, revenue recognition, billing and renewal forecasting, so the business works from one consistent set of numbers.
  • As pricing develops, build the underlying cost model, stress-test the pricing, and help operationalise it into real billing and revenue recognition.
  • Build the financial visibility to manage unit economics, including COGS (inference, speech-to-text and LLM costs) with engineering, and margin with commercial.
  • Help shape and standardise commercial contract terms to improve cash flow and make revenue cleaner to recognise.
• Financial planning and analysis
  • Own the financial model working with the outsourced provider: maintaining scenario capability, stress-testing key assumptions, and keeping it reconciled to actuals.
  • Run a monthly forecasting and variance process with clear accountability across the team.
  • Manage cash flow and runway with transparency, presenting scenarios to leadership on an ongoing basis.
  • Lead budgeting that is light enough not to slow the business down, but rigorous enough for real control, with budgets and headcount owned by the teams and finance partnering and challenging.
• Finance operations, systems and process
  • Manage our outsourced provider to ensure accurate bookkeeping, timely close and clean reporting, assess bringing scope in-house over time as capacity allows.
  • Build the processes first and then the systems to support them, across revenue and billing, purchase-to-pay and approvals, and cash and treasury, buying tools on trigger rather than aspiration.
  • Introduce sensible spend-approval and procurement guidelines that protect cash without creating bureaucracy.
  • Ensure R&D tax claims are optimised, and VAT and payroll are managed accurately through our providers.
• Risk, controls and governance
  • Develop financial controls and governance that are proportionate to our stage and scale with the business.
  • Maintain oversight of financial risk, contributing to the risk register, with input on insurance cover and renewals.
  • Establish governance rhythms appropriate for our stage and investor expectations.
  • Support equity and cap table administration alongside the People team.

You have probably been part of a journey where the finance function was built rather than inherited, and you were the person who built it, or who kept it standing. You knew where every number came from, and could explain it without opening the file. A fundraise or an audit ran alongside everything else, and month-end still happened on time. Processes were good enough rather than perfect, and you improved them without stopping the business to do it. You took something over from someone else, or handed something over, and you know what actually makes that work.

What we are looking for

• A qualified accountant (ACA, ACCA, CIMA or equivalent), or qualified by experience with a track record that speaks for itself.
• Experience as the most senior finance person in a small company, or a strong number two ready to step up and hold the whole thing, ideally in a startup or scale-up. You want to build a function, not inherit one.
• Comfortable across the full range in a single day: a technical accounting judgement, a supplier query, a board paper, a payroll question.
• You are comfortable in a technical environment, where the people around you are expert in something you are not, and you can learn enough of their language to be useful. Ideally a background in healthtech, medtech, or another sector with complex, long-cycle or public-sector revenue, where income does not follow a neat SaaS curve.
• Strong financial modelling: you can build, stress-test and communicate a model an investor will trust.
• Experience managing outsourced finance providers and holding them to a high standard, with a view on what to bring in-house and when.
• Exposure to fundraising, diligence and board reporting.
• Discreet and trustworthy. You will hold the cap table, payroll and board material.
• A clear communicator. Much of the value of this role is making complex financial positions understandable to people who are not accountants, and challenging assumptions without friction.

Why join us

• Own and build the finance function of a fast-growing healthtech at the point it matters most, with a path to grow as the company scales.
• Work directly with the fractional CFO, CEO and leadership on decisions that shape the business.
• Do work that matters: giving clinicians their time back and improving care.
• Competitive salary, meaningful equity, and the range and ownership of a genuine first-in-role hire.

Tortus is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from all backgrounds and are happy to discuss flexible and hybrid working.