Fractional CFO - Stride

Foundation Partners; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Free StrideOne membership plus family

discount for family and friends

Job summary

Stride is seeking a senior financial leader to own the finance function a few days per week, reporting to the CEO. You’ll manage grants, loans, governance, and cash planning while overseeing accounting, tax credits, and investor reporting.

The role blends hands-on detail with strategic oversight in a fast-growing consumer health platform. You’ll bring ACA/ACCA/CIMA qualifications and a track record in forecasting, budgeting, and management reporting within small teams, including fractional or

Qualifications

• ACA, ACCA, CIMA or equivalent, plus senior experience as a CFO, FD or head of finance
• Experience in a fast-growing consumer, subscription or DTC business, ideally health, wellness or diagnostics
• Comfort with compliance-heavy reporting where other people’s money is on the line
• Strong command of forecasting, budgeting and management reporting in a small, fast-moving team
• A track record working fractionally or as an embedded interim, and the discipline to make a few days count
• Clear writing: you can turn a funder’s requirements or a messy ledger into something others can act on
• Fluency with modern finance and AI tooling, used to move faster than the team size allows

Responsibilities

• Own financial reporting for the grant and loan: quarterly claims, drawdowns, spend against profile and the evidence behind every eligible cost
• Run the funding governance framework: what can be claimed, how costs are coded and evidenced, and who signs off
• Keep Stride inside the loan’s financial conditions, with headroom visible well before every reporting date
• Manage independent accountant sign-off and funder assurance, with paperwork ready before it’s asked for
• Own the financial side of change requests, including the cost justification funders expect
• Own monthly management accounts and a board pack that tells the story behind the numbers
• Oversee bookkeeping, payroll inputs, supplier payments and a predictable month-end close
• Work with external accountants on statutory accounts, tax and R&D tax credits
• Build the controls and audit trail a funded company needs, without process for its own sake
• Track the subscription metrics that matter: CAC, LTV, cohort retention, gross margin and recurring revenue
• Manage working capital and existing facilities, and advise on how to fund each stage of growth
• Tell the CEO early when a decision will change the cash picture
• Support fundraising, due diligence and reporting to existing investors
• Keep Stride compliant with EIS/SEIS and other investor scheme conditions
• Plan the finance side of our US expansion: entity, currency and tax
• Work closely with the CEO on decisions, and with our Chief of Staff, who owns delivery of the funded projects and the funder relationship
• Make sure what we’ve spent always matches what we’ve delivered
• Give straight answers on what the numbers mean, including when it’s not what we hoped

Job description

UK (Hybrid) | Reporting to CEO | 2-3 days a week from January 2027

Free StrideOne membership plus family and friends discount

About Stride

'Normal' health is no longer good enough. Normal is code for tired, stressed, barely functioning and slowly declining, and calling that a life. We think everyone has a right to better than that.

Stride is turning tracking your entire internal biology into a lifestyle, with a next generation preventative health membership. Every member builds a multi-omic health profile covering DNA, microbiome, blood biomarkers, epigenetics and oral health. That’s over 500 biomarkers, tested at least twice a year, so we can see direction of travel and not just a single point in time.

Then we turn it into what to actually do: what to eat, how to train, what to supplement, what to watch, with a coach, dietitian or physiologist alongside you.

Imagine an elite longevity concierge, at an everyday price, with no stuffy clinics to attend!

The Role

Stride has grown mostly on its own revenue: £5.2M to date, 15,000+ paying customers and a 94% six-month renewal rate on our flagship membership. We’re now adding serious institutional money on top: a competitive Innovate UK grant and a multi-million-pound Innovation Loan, funding two projects at the centre of our plans.

You’ll own finance at Stride a few days a week: hands-on in the detail, senior in the room, and building a function that runs well without you there every day. This isn’t a bookkeeping or advisory role. You’ll have real authority and be accountable for the outcome.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Own financial reporting for the grant and loan: quarterly claims, drawdowns, spend against profile and the evidence behind every eligible cost
• Run the funding governance framework: what can be claimed, how costs are coded and evidenced, and who signs off
• Keep Stride inside the loan’s financial conditions, with headroom visible well before every reporting date
• Manage independent accountant sign-off and funder assurance, with paperwork ready before it’s asked for
• Own the financial side of change requests, including the cost justification funders expect

Reporting & Control

• Own monthly management accounts and a board pack that tells the story behind the numbers
• Oversee bookkeeping, payroll inputs, supplier payments and a predictable month-end close
• Work with external accountants on statutory accounts, tax and R&D tax credits
• Build the controls and audit trail a funded company needs, without process for its own sake

Forecasting, Cash & Planning

• Own the cash flow forecast, budget and scenario planning, and keep them live
• Track the subscription metrics that matter: CAC, LTV, cohort retention, gross margin and recurring revenue
• Manage working capital and existing facilities, and advise on how to fund each stage of growth
• Tell the CEO early when a decision will change the cash picture

Funding & Growth

• Support fundraising, due diligence and reporting to existing investors
• Keep Stride compliant with EIS/SEIS and other investor scheme conditions
• Plan the finance side of our US expansion: entity, currency and tax

Cross-functional Partnership

• Work closely with the CEO on decisions, and with our Chief of Staff, who owns delivery of the funded projects and the funder relationship
• Make sure what we’ve spent always matches what we’ve delivered
• Give straight answers on what the numbers mean, including when it’s not what we hoped

What You’ll Bring

• ACA, ACCA, CIMA or equivalent, plus senior experience as a CFO, FD or head of finance
• Experience in a fast-growing consumer, subscription or DTC business, ideally health, wellness or diagnostics
• Comfort with compliance-heavy reporting where other people’s money is on the line
• Strong command of forecasting, budgeting and management reporting in a small, fast-moving team
• A track record working fractionally or as an embedded interim, and the discipline to make a few days count
• Clear writing: you can turn a funder’s requirements or a messy ledger into something others can act on
• Fluency with modern finance and AI tooling, used to move faster than the team size allows

Bonus points:

Innovate UK claims or equivalent grant and loan reporting, supporting a fundraise or acquisition, EIS/SEIS, R&D tax credits, multi-currency operations, taking a business into the US, or regulated/diagnostics experience.

Why Stride

• Preventive health is where consumer health is heading, and your work helps people find out earlier, not too late
• Own a function, not a ledger, and shape how it’s run from day one
• Work directly with a founder who took DNAfit through an eight-figure exit to Prenetics before a Nasdaq listing, plus an advisor who scaled Peloton’s international business to $100M
• Flexible days agreed around your other commitments

A People team built for ambitious businesses

The old model for People & Talent doesn’t work for today's businesses. We’ve built a better one.

Traditionally, early‑stage Founders had two options: handle People & Talent themselves, losing precious time they should be spending on product or go‑to‑market, or hire a generalist, expected to cover everything from culture to recruitment to performance. We offer a more impactful alternative: A fully flexible, fractional People & Talent team with specialist skillsets and hands‑on delivery, ready to start driving impact for your business in weeks, not months.