R&D Finance Lead

Parallel Web Systems; San Francisco, Palo Alto (CA, CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Generous equity

Visa sponsorships

401K plans

Daily lunch & office snacks

Dinner at the office

Unlimited vacation

Caltrain pass reimbursement

Job summary

Parallel Web Systems in the San Francisco Bay Area is seeking a senior finance leader to build and run the Finance function for our R&D organization. You will own the model for compute commitments, track training, inference and infrastructure spend, and forecast spend as product scale accelerates.

You will partner with engineering, procurement, and accounting leaders on headcount plans, budgets, and the tradeoffs between building, buying and computing, turning cost per query and gross margin

Qualifications

• You’ve owned Finance for an engineering or infrastructure organization at a high-growth tech company.
• You understand reserved vs. on-demand pricing, GPU commitments, and how utilization drives long-term unit economics.
• You can sit with engineering leaders, understand what they’re building, and turn it into a cost model they trust.

Responsibilities

• Own the cost model for compute commitments, tracking training, inference and infrastructure spend against commitments and product usage.
• Forecast where spend heads as the product scales; partner with leaders on headcount plans, budgets, and tradeoffs between building, buying and computing.
• Collaborate with procurement and Accounting to determine capitalization and treatment of R&D costs; translate cost metrics into a clear company strategy.

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 build and lead the Finance function for Parallel’s Research and Engineering (R&D) organization. Our product is deeply technical, so this team is the engine room of the company. You will own the model for our compute commitments. These are some of the highest-stakes decisions we make, and they call for structured planning over medium- and long-term horizons. You’ll track training, inference and infrastructure spend against commitments and product usage, and forecast where it’s headed as the product scales rapidly. You’ll partner directly with company leaders on headcount plans, budgets, and the tradeoffs between building, buying and adding compute. You’ll work with Parallel’s procurement lead on compute and vendor negotiations, and with Accounting on how R&D costs are treated and capitalized. You’ll turn cost per query, contribution and gross margin, and infrastructure efficiency into a clear strategy for the company.
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 major cost line. You understand reserved vs. on-demand pricing, GPU commitments, and how utilization drives long-term unit economics. You can sit with engineering leaders, 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 you’ve worked where the data is messy and the process doesn’t exist yet. You’ve told a technical leader, or even a founder or CEO, that their plan was too expensive, then helped them find a cheaper way to get there. You’ve used AI tools to do real work faster, and you’re eager to find new ways to apply them. You take ownership without being asked, flag problems early, and want to grow into a senior finance leader at Parallel.

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