Finance & Operations Builder: Shape the Core Systems

Alma; California; On-site; USD 125,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Meaningful equity

PTO + holidays

Wellness allowance

Direct access to CEO and leadership

Job summary

Alma, based in the San Francisco area, seeks a Strategic Finance & Operations Lead to own the finance function end to end and glue operations across teams. This builder's seat combines strategic work with hands-on execution, including modeling, budgeting, and board reporting.

You’ll partner with the CEO and scale finance, legal, and operations as the company grows, bringing rigor, process, and strategic judgment to every decision.

Qualifications

• 1–3 years of investment banking or equivalent finance/strategy/ops experience at an early-stage startup.
• Proficiency in building a three-statement financial model from scratch.
• Ability to influence across legal, product, sales, and engineering teams.
• Strong judgment with money and ability to design policies and processes.

Responsibilities

• Own and build Alma's financial model end to end.
• Run monthly close with accountants and deliver leadership-ready outputs.
• Own budget vs actuals, rolling forecasts, cash runway, and headcount planning.
• Maintain unit economics at case and client level to protect margins.
• Prepare investor updates and participate in quarterly board reporting.
• Support fundraising with data room prep and due diligence workstreams.
• Model pricing, discounting, and compensation costs for commercial decisions.
• Lead internal operations improvements and establish scalable processes.
• Design dashboards, reporting cadence, and metrics definitions.

Skills

Excel

Financial modeling

Strategic thinking

Cross-functional influence

Tools

SQL

Job description

Hi there! We're Alma 👋

We're on a mission to make immigration more accessible, transparent, and human through cutting-edge technology and thoughtful legal support.

Hi there! We're Alma 👋

We're on a mission to make immigration more accessible, transparent, and human through cutting-edge technology and thoughtful legal support.

We're backed by top-tier investors (Bling, Forerunner, Village Global, NFX, NEA, MVP, Conviction, and Silkroad Innovation), and our team combines decades of experience across immigration law, product, operations, and high-growth startups.

The role

We're hiring an AI-native finance operator to own the day-to-day financial engine of the business today and become the leader of Alma’s finance organization tomorrow.

From Day 1, you will own revenue accuracy, billing and collections, cash movement, and the monthly close, and to bring order and automation to processes that are currently manual. You'll be the internal owner who directs our outsourced accounting, trust-accounting, and audit partners, defines how we measure revenue, and makes sure the numbers are right, and they match the cash in the bank.

This is a high-ownership seat with a clear growth path. As you get the books clean and automated, you'll grow into strategic finance: forecasting, budgeting, and margin analysis, that shapes how we run the business.

We're looking for someone who can both roll up their sleeves on the operational grind today and is sharp enough to automate it away and step up over time.

What you'll own todayRevenue accuracy

• Define what counts as revenue each month and apply it consistently, including cases billed in installments
• Match every case to the right client and deal so revenue isn't over- or under-counted, and correctly classify each category and segments of revenues
  
  

Billing & collections

• Own invoicing across our platform, Stripe, and off-platform, and make sure every invoice ties to the right case.
• Own accounts receivable end to end — drive collections, enforce controls like collecting the required deposit before work begins, and clean up outstanding balances.
• Process refunds and adjustments per policy and keep a clear record of the reason each time.
  
  

Treasury & payments

• Pay vendor invoices, manage company cards and per-team spend limits, and fund payroll on time across both entities.
• Own our bank accounts, signatories, and money movement, and keep recurring payments and auto-charges clean and current.
  
  

Monthly close & outside firms

• Run the monthly close and produce the P&L: pulling from our stack (HubSpot, Rippling, Brex, Mercury, and the banks), categorizing expenses, and running the sanity checks that catch real errors.
• Direct and quality-check our outsourced accountants and external auditor: feed them clean data, keep everyone aligned on one revenue definition, and catch mistakes before they land.
  
  

Payroll, contractors & commissions

• Run payrolls and set up one-off items (e.g. bonuses) from signed agreements.
• Manage contractor payments, and coordinate and approve the sales-commission pay run.
  
  

People ops (light)

• Handle onboarding/offboarding logistics — HRIS setup, equipment, background checks — and own routine HR and benefits administration.
  
  

Systems & automation (important)

• Automate all the manual work across the above bullet points — including working with our product and engineering team to build financial controls into the platform.
• Rationalize our finance tooling and vendor relationships (consolidate where we have overlap).
  
  

What you will own 3-6 months from now

As the day-to-day gets clean and automated, you'll take on more of strategic finance leadership:

• Building a forward-looking P&L and an operating model that ties headcount and capacity to margins over time.
• Setting assumption-driven budgets with each department head and tracking actuals against them.
• Defining and improving gross margin and unit economics, and recommending structural changes to how we bill and operate.
• Getting the numbers investor-ready and supporting corporate-development work
  
  

You don't need to have all of these skills or experiences today. We can teach you the rest. What matters most is a quick-learning mindset and the drive to grow into a strategic finance leader.

What we're looking for (must have)

• Bachelor’s degree in Accounting, Finance, or related field
• 3+ years of progressive accounting experience, including 1+ years in high-growth startups or tech companies
• Extensive accounting knowledge with a firm grasp of current US GAAP standards
• Proven track record establishing and growing financial operations in a fast-paced or early-stage ("0→1") setting
• Skilled with contemporary accounting platforms (familiarity with AI-native or automation-first ERPs is a bonus) and wider financial tools
• Effective partner across teams; capable of translating complex accounting and financial ideas for stakeholders outside of finance
• Sharp eye for detail combined with sound operational judgment
• An entrepreneurial approach: you take strong ownership, work with urgency, and build structure where none yet exists
  
  

Nice to have

• CPA or CFA qualification
• FP&A / financial modeling experience.
• Experience with multi-entity finance, professional-services or law-firm accounting, or trust accounting.
• Hands-on familiarity with our stack (Stripe, Rippling, Brex, Mercury, HubSpot) or comparable tools.
  
  

The ideal candidate

The ideal candidate is a sharp, hands-on finance operator who can walk in and bring order to the day-to-day — owning revenue accuracy, collections, and our outside accounting partners — while spotting the manual work that should be automated and building it away. You're equally comfortable grinding through a messy reconciliation and stepping back to ask why the process exists at all.

You likely come from one of two backgrounds:

• An early finance hire at a Series seed–B startup who has worn every hat, or
• An ex-IB banker, MBB analyst, ex-Big 4 auditor, transaction advisory, or FDD wizzard, now a year or two into an in-house finance role
  
  

Above all, you have the aptitude and ambition to grow into strategic finance — forecasting, budgets, and margins — and become the finance leader of a fast-growing company

What It's Like To Work At Alma

We're a small, mission-driven team reimagining immigration from the ground up. We value thoughtfulness, speed, and building systems that scale. You'll own the financial backbone of a category-defining company from day one, sitting right next to our CEO with a real path to grow into a strategic finance leader

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive base salary based on experience, plus meaningful equity
• 100% Health coverage + Vision + Dental
• 20 days PTO + 10 Federal Holidays
• $250 per month in wellness allowance
• Direct, daily access to our CEO and leadership team, on the decisions that actually shape the company
• A rare scope for someone this early in their career: build a finance function from zero, with the support to grow into leading it
  
  

A Quick Note

We know the "perfect" candidate doesn't exist. If this role excites you but you don't meet every qualification, we'd still love to hear from you. Immigration is complex. So are people. That's what makes this work so meaningful.

Compensation Range: $135K - $180K