Financial Operations Lead

Solveintelligence; Greater London; On-site; GBP 101,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Full visa sponsorship

Private medical insurance

Free meals

Job summary

Solve Intelligence is seeking a hands-on Financial Operations Lead based in London to own finance end-to-end, automate processes with AI, and partner with Sales and Marketing to drive rapid growth across three offices.

You’ll manage payments, billing, budgeting, and financial modelling while building the finance function from scratch as the company scales.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in finance at high-growth tech companies.
• Deep fluency in accounting and external accounting coordination.
• Track record of implementing scalable finance processes and tooling.
• Strong modelling skills across budgets, forecasts, P&L, and cash.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.

Responsibilities

• Own supplier payments end-to-end, including approvals and avoiding duplicates.
• Own customer invoicing across 1,000+ clients and cash collection.
• Run month-end close with external accountants and define metrics.
• Design and implement the finance stack and automation with AI.
• Build budgeting and approval processes with founders and teams.
• Model financials for big decisions like office leases and hiring plans.

Skills

Finance leadership

Accounting fluency

Vendor negotiations

Automation & tooling

Education

Accounting qualification (ACA/ACCA/CIMA)

Tools

ERP systems

Billing & AR systems

Job description

At Solve Intelligence, we're building something people actually want - and we have the revenue and traction to prove it.

The Role: Financial Operations Lead

Less than 24 months since launch, we are adding 7 figures of ARR per month, we have raised ~$60M USD, and we are quadrupling headcount this year. We've built a world-class team of AI PhDs, engineers, and patent attorneys. Now, we need a high-energy, ambitious Financial Operations Lead to help us scale to $1B+ ARR.

You'll be our first dedicated finance hire, based in London and working directly with the founders.

Until now, finance has not been run by any single person. Your job is to own it end-to-end: get the fundamentals running flawlessly, then build the processes, tooling, and budgets that scale us to 100+ people across our three offices (London, New York, and Munich) and our continued revenue growth.

This isn't a CFO-strategist role, and it isn't bookkeeping.

It's for a hands-on generalist who understands accounting deeply, executes relentlessly, and is happy to go invoice-by-invoice in the morning, build the company budget in the afternoon, and model financials in the evening. You'll do things that don't scale at first to learn the business inside out, automate them away with tooling and AI, and grow into a true business partner to Sales and Marketing — the person with a 360° view of Solve.

What you'll own:

• Payments (AP): Own supplier payments end-to-end — approval workflows, invoices paid on time, duplicates and double-payments caught before they happen — and lead vendor negotiations on everything from software to office space.
• Billing & Collections (AR): Own customer invoicing across our 1,000+ law firm and enterprise clients. Partner with RevOps to collect our backlog of overdue invoices fast and keep cash flowing in.
• The Monthly Close & Metrics: Run our external accountants to an accurate, on-time close every month. Own our financial metrics — definitions, reporting, the single source of truth — and work hand-in-hand with the CEO on communicating them to the board and investors.
• Processes & Tooling: Design and implement our finance stack from scratch. Approvals, procurement, spend management, billing, and more. Choose tools that scale and automate aggressively with AI.
• Budgets & Financial Culture: Work directly with the founders to build our first budgeting and approval processes (hiring, marketing, conferences, offices, etc) and partner closely with every team. Help the founders instil a culture where money is not free.
• Modelling & Big Decisions: Build the financial models behind our biggest calls — office leases, hiring plans, marketing budgets — and get stuck into special projects like M&A (we've already made two acquisitions this year).
• International Finance: Own the finance side of operating and expanding across three countries (and counting): budgets for new office setup, transfer pricing, and international tax, working with our external advisors.
• Cash & Treasury: Steward the ~$60M we've raised: payroll and vendors always paid, cash put to work safely.

About Solve Intelligence

We are the fastest-growing startup transforming Intellectual Property. Our AI platform handles everything from invention harvesting and patent generation through to litigation and licensing.

• Growth: 20–30% MoM revenue growth; 8 figures of ARR just ~2 years since launch.
• Market: 600+ IP teams across 6 continents, including Tier-1 firms like DLA Piper, tech giants, and boutiques.
• Impact: Users report 50–90% efficiency and quality improvements.
• Backing: ~$60M from Y Combinator, 20VC, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, and the founders of top companies like Stripe, Perplexity, Tinder, Deel, Hugging Face, and Canva. See our Series B announcement.

Who You'll Work With

You’ll be joining a founding team with deep pedigree:

• Sanj (CRO): PhD in AI (Gatsby Unit, UCL), ex-Huawei R&D, former lead at Magic Carpet AI (acquired).
• Chris (CEO): PhD in AI (UCL), published researcher, ex-Dyson and Alan Turing Institute.
• Angus (CTO): MEng Computer Science, ex-Qualcomm and Coremont (Brevan Howard).

Who You Are

We are a high-performance culture. To thrive here:

• You get your hands dirty: You’ll happily go line-by-line through invoices, the CRM, and the bank to make things clean — then automate the process so it stays clean.
• You're detail-obsessed: Duplicate invoices, overdue payments, wrong pricing — nothing gets past you.
• You have high agency: There's no playbook and no finance team behind you (yet). Give you an ambiguous problem and you’ll work it out: find the mess, own it, fix it.
• You're a business partner, not a back-office cop: You work close to Sales, Marketing, and the wider team, helping everyone spend smarter and move faster. You know the highest-leverage thing finance can do here is accelerate growth — nudging our treasury yield from 2.7% to 2.9% is not the job.
• You're all-in: Solve is fast and intense, and this isn’t a 9–5. You get passionate — even obsessive — about the problems you own.
• You're ambitious: You’ll do the dirty work now because you want to build the finance function as we scale.

What You Bring

Must-Haves:

• 5+ years in finance or finance-heavy operations at high-growth tech companies — e.g., FP&A lead/head, finance ops, or a generalist operator with a finance spike — now hungry for broader scope.
• Deep fluency in accounting — you can run external accountants to an on-time close — without needing to be an accountant yourself.
• A track record of implementing finance processes, tooling, and automation that scale with a fast-growing company.
• Strong modelling skills across budgets, forecasts, P&L, and cash.
• Exceptionally clear written and verbal communication.

Preferred & Nice-to-Haves:

• First/early finance hire experience: You've built a finance function from scratch — or been the #2 to a great CFO/VP of Finance at a scaling startup and seen what good looks like.
• Procurement & negotiation: Experience negotiating vendor contracts and pricing.
• Treasury: Experience managing cash and liquidity at scale.
• Multi-entity experience: Exposure to international operations — consolidation across entities, transfer pricing, or international tax.
• Accounting foundation: An accounting qualification (ACA/ACCA/CIMA), or fundamentals from banking, consulting, or VC — since battle-tested in a scrappy, hands-on environment.
• STEM background: A technical or quantitative degree (maths, CS, physics, engineering, etc.) — bonus points if you can write a bit of code.
• Tooling mastery: Experience with modern finance stacks (e.g., ERP/accounting, spend management, billing & AR systems), and experience leveraging AI across everything you do (Claude Code/Cowork, Cursor, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc).

What's In It For You?

• Compensation: Competitive base + significant equity — true ownership in a high-growth startup.
• Founding Impact: Be finance hire #1, build the function from the ground up with the freedom to spot and prioritise what matters most, and grow into leading it as we scale.
• Support: Full visa sponsorship and private medical insurance.
• Perks: Free meals and the chance to work with the smartest minds in AI.

Compensation: $135K – $200K Offers Equity

Estimated base salary $135K – $200K Offers Equity