R&D Strategic Finance Lead

Wwshemi; California; On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Parallel is seeking a Finance leader for its R&D organization to own compute and capital planning in a high-growth environment. You will build scalable cost models, forecast spend, and partner with engineers and procurement to optimize compute usage.

You’ll lead cost analysis, influence budgeting, and shape long-term financial strategy for the product and infrastructure teams. Equity is available as part of the compensation.

Qualifications

• Experience owning finance for engineering or infrastructure at a high-growth tech company.
• Deep understanding of reserved vs. on-demand pricing and GPU commitments.
• Ability to build trusted cost models with engineering leadership.
• Comfort turning complex data into actionable recommendations.

Responsibilities

• Own the cost model for compute commitments within R&D finance.
• Forecast compute spend, track training and infrastructure usage.
• Partner with procurement on vendor negotiations and capitalization with Accounting.
• Collaborate with leaders on headcount budgets and tradeoffs between building vs buying.
• Identify opportunities to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Skills

Cost modeling

Finance leadership

Tech compute budgeting

Cross-functional collaboration

AI/automation tools

Tools

AI tools

Cost analytics tools

Job description

Parallel On-site - Bay Area, California, United States Posted 2026-11-03

This listing's locations On-site - Bay Area, California, United States

Employment Full-time

Workplace On site

Compensation USD 200000–300000 per year Offers Equity

Department: Operations

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‑hearted 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.