Strategic Finance & Operations Lead

Every company says it listens to its customers. Few actually talk to them, because real interviews take weeks to recruit, schedule and analyze, and the answer usually arrives after the decision has been made.

Dialogue fixes that. Our AI interviewer holds live, in-depth voice conversations with real people, recruited from a vetted panel of more than ten million, in 87 languages. It follows up the way a good researcher would, and the findings land in hours instead of weeks, with every insight linked to the quote and the video behind it. Teams at Google, Meta, TikTok, Wayfair, Tonal and Kalshi use it to test concepts, understand why customers leave, track their brand and decide what to build next. Thousands of interviews run through it every month.

We were founded by product leaders from Apple, Reddit, Snapchat, Twitter, Remedy/Thirty Madison and Nextdoor, our research team comes from Airbnb, Slack and Google, and we are backed by Lightspeed. We are one of the fastest-growing startups in Los Angeles.

About the job

You report to our VP of Growth and BizOps, who owns finance, legal, people, growth and the weekly operating rhythm. You take over the numbers: the monthly close with our outside accountants, the pricing and margin models, and the reporting our founders, board and investors run on. Most of it already has a model, a playbook or a prior month to copy. Your first job is to make the numbers reconcile every time. Your second is to make them say something.

It is a finance role with a generalist's range. In one week you might close a month, reprice an enterprise quote, rebuild cost per interview from the warehouse, refresh the runway readout, paper an order form, and answer three "is it paid?" questions from the team.

What you will own in your first 90 days

• The close. Our outside accountants keep the books; you own them. That means the monthly close: source documents, accruals, cost of revenue versus opex, deferred revenue, the open questions list. Nothing gets restated because a question went unanswered.
• Unit economics and margin. Cost per completed interview (panel incentives, platform fees, compute), gross margin by customer, credit use and overage. You find the leaks, size them and propose the fix.
• Pricing. You run our pricing cards, price every quote under them, and model prepay, ladder and rollover structures for enterprise deals. The VP sets the rates; you build the case for them.
• Reporting. Burn, runway and collections against bank actuals every month, a weekly revenue and ARR dashboard, and the board and investor materials. Every number reconciles to the model before it leaves the building.
• The cash cycle. Invoices out on time, receivables chased, vendor bills paid, and a clean monthly packet for the accountants.
• Contract economics. Order forms with the commercial terms right (credits, overage, prepay, true-up), commission and bonus math, and vendor commitments modeled before anyone signs them.
• The operating rhythm. The Monday all-hands page, the weekly sales agenda, and the internal questions that are really finance questions.
• The small stuff. Until we hire an office admin, about a tenth of the week is logistics (lunch orders, travel). We would rather say it now.

Where it goes

Once the close and reporting are steady, you take first passes at the harder material with the VP reviewing: the economics of inbound contracts, new pricing structures, the budget and hiring plan, and the board's finance questions. At the start the VP makes the pricing calls, negotiates the contracts and speaks to investors and counsel, and you build the model behind each one. How quickly those move to you depends on you.

We are a meritocracy. Scope here follows judgment, not tenure, and we do not see a ceiling on this role. The people who do it well end up running finance, and we would be glad to see you outgrow the title.

You might be a fit if

• You have 3 to 6 years in strategic finance, FP&A, investment banking, transaction advisory or Big Four audit, and at least one stint at a startup where you owned the model rather than a slice of it. A first finance hire at a seed or Series A company is the ideal shape.
• You know SaaS unit economics (gross margin, ARR versus run rate, net revenue retention, payback) and can build a working model from a bank export and a ledger without a template.
• You have real accounting literacy: accruals, deferred revenue, cost-of-revenue classification. You can hold your own with an outside accountant and know when they are wrong.
• You read a contract for its economics: credits, overage, prepay, true-up, rollover, payment terms.
• You are expert in spreadsheets, can write or learn SQL (our usage and credit data live in BigQuery), and already use AI tools for real work and check the output against source.
• You write plainly. Founders, board members and accountants will read your numbers without the model open.
• You are discreet and keep a high bar for a number that leaves the building. When two systems disagree you flag it. You never average.
• You do not resent the generalist layer. A company this size asks its finance person to order lunch sometimes.
• You are expert in spreadsheets and can write or learn SQL (our usage and credit data live in BigQuery).

AI fluency

This is a requirement, not a nice-to-have. The VP runs most of the operating side through AI: a written operating system with Claude in the loop, custom skills for recurring work (contract review, finance checks, the weekly revenue dashboard), and agents connected to our CRM, spend data, inbox and data warehouse. We need you at that level within your first month.

You're a good fit if:

• You use AI agents for real work, not just drafting emails: reconciling a ledger export, building a model from a bank file, reading a contract for its economics, pulling and checking numbers from the warehouse.
• You write a precise brief, break a big job into pieces an agent can run, and know when a task needs a careful model and when a fast, cheap one will do.
• You check every number an AI hands you against source before it leaves the building. You know the failure modes (a confident wrong total, a dropped row, an invented source) and you test for them.
• When you do something twice, you turn it into a reusable skill, template or automation, and you write it down so someone else can run it.
• You have built something with these tools that you can show us: a model, an agent, a workflow, a script. Bring it to the interview.

How we work

Everything is written down. Signed paper beats Slack, and Slack beats the CRM. The VP will tell you what good looks like once, in writing, and expect you to run it from there. You will have access to our banking, accounting, payroll and cap table tools from week one, scoped to the work, with the VP approving payments and any number that goes to the board. A background check comes first.

Pay and logistics

Los Angeles, in person. Reports to the VP of Growth and BizOps. Start as soon as possible.

• Base salary $120,000 to $160,000, plus equity
• Full health, dental and vision coverage
• Flexible PTO
• Office meals and premium snacks
• Productivity stipend
• Team events and offsites
• Commuter benefits

How to apply

Send a short note on a number you once found was wrong when everyone believed it, how you found it, and what changed because of it. No cover letter. We will reply to every application. Finalists do a three-hour paid work sample at home: build a burn and runway readout from a month of bank actuals, rebuild cost per interview and reprice a quote, and triage a Tuesday of Slack questions.