R&D Finance Lead

Parallel; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Generous equity

Visa sponsorships

401K plans

Lunch and snacks

Office dinners

Unlimited vacation

Caltrain commute

Job summary

Parallel is seeking a finance lead for its research and engineering organization. You’ll own the cost model for compute, tracking training, inference, and infrastructure spend, and forecast where it’s headed as the product scales.

You’ll partner with engineering and research leadership on headcount plans, budgets, and tradeoffs between building, buying, and spending more compute. You’ll work with procurement on compute and vendor negotiations, and with accounting on how R&D costs get treated and

Qualifications

• Owned finance for an engineering or infrastructure organization at a high-growth tech company.
• Experience building cost models for compute, training, inference, and infrastructure spend.
• Ability to forecast spend and costs as products scale.
• Experience turning technical cost data into clear recommendations for leadership.
• Familiarity with AI tooling to assist finance work.

Responsibilities

• Own the model for compute costs within Parallel’s research and engineering organization.
• Track training, inference, and infrastructure spend against commitments and usage.
• Forecast future spend as the product scales and guide budgeting decisions.
• Partner with engineering and research leadership on headcount plans, budgets, and tradeoffs between building, buying, and spending more compute.
• Collaborate with procurement on compute/vendor negotiations and with accounting on R&D cost treatment and capitalization.
• Translate cost per query, gross margin, and infrastructure efficiency into actionable recommendations for the founding team.

Job description

About us

Parallel is a web infrastructure company. Our products are used by leading businesses in sales, marketing, insurance, and coding to build best-in-class AI agents with flexible and powerful programmatic access to the web.

We've raised $230 million from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, First Round, and Terrain to build the web for AIs. We're currently valued at $2 billion and we're forming a world-class team of engineers, designers, marketers, sellers, researchers, and operational experts to achieve our mission.

Job: You will own finance for Parallel’s research and engineering organization, where most of our spend goes. You’ll build the model for compute, our largest and fastest-moving cost, tracking training, inference, and infrastructure spend against commitments and usage, and you’ll forecast where it’s headed as the product scales. You’ll partner directly with engineering and research leadership on headcount plans, budgets, and the tradeoffs between building, buying, and spending more compute. You’ll work with procurement on compute and vendor negotiations, and with accounting on how R&D costs get treated and capitalized. You’ll turn cost per query, gross margin, and infrastructure efficiency into clear recommendations, and you’ll make sure the founding team knows what every major technical bet costs before they make it.

You: You’ve owned finance for an engineering or infrastructure organization at a high-growth tech company, ideally one where compute or cloud was a top cost line. You understand reserved versus on-demand pricing, GPU commitments, and how utilization drives unit economics. You can sit with engineers, understand what they’re building, and turn it into a cost model they trust. You came up through a high-rigor environment and since then have worked where the data is messy and the process doesn’t exist yet. You’ve told a technical leader their plan was too expensive and helped them find a cheaper way to get there. You use AI tools to do real work, and you’d rather build the function than inherit it.

Life at Parallel

Our team works fully in-person, between our Palo Alto HQ and San Francisco office. We’re a flat, talent-dense organization dedicated to solving technical and creative problems.

We seek like-minded individuals who share our passion for applying science, creativity, and consistency to big and complex problems with equally big outcomes. These are our values:

• Own customer impact: It’s on us to ensure real-world outcomes for our customers.

• Obsess over craft: Perfect every detail because quality compounds.

• Accelerate change: Ship fast, adapt faster, and move frontier ideas into production.

• Create win-wins: Creatively turn trade-offs into upside.

• Make high-conviction bets: Try and fail. But succeed an unfair amount.

Compensation & benefits

• Competitive salary

• Generous equity

• Visa sponsorships

• 401K plans

• Daily lunch & office snacks

• Dinner at the office

• Unlimited vacation

• Caltrain pass reimbursement