R&D Strategic Finance Lead

Parallel

San Francisco (CA)

On-site

USD 180,000 - 280,000

Full time

9 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Generous equity

Visa sponsorships

401K plan

Lunch & snacks

Dinner at the office

Unlimited vacation

Caltrain pass reimbursement

Job summary

Parallel is seeking a senior finance leader to build and own the Finance function for our Research and Engineering (R&D) organization. You will manage compute-related budgeting, forecasting, and cost modeling to support rapid product scaling and strategic decisions.

You’ll partner with engineering leaders on headcount planning, vendor negotiations, and capitalization of R&D costs. The role sits in a high-growth environment with direct exposure to company leadership and ownership of long-term

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