Finance & Operations Lead

Doist; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity (significant)

Health coverage

20 days PTO + 10 holidays

Wellness allowance $250/mo

Direct access to CEO

Job summary

Alma is hiring a Strategic Finance & Operations Lead to be the first dedicated finance hire. You will own the numbers end-to-end, build the financial model, and fix operational bottlenecks across legal, internal processes, and vendor management.

The role blends strategic finance with hands-on operational work, including budgeting, forecasting, and reporting to leadership and the board. This is a senior, builder-focused role at an early-stage stage company.

Responsibilities

• Own the financial model end-to-end and dashboard the analytics for leadership
• Run monthly close in partnership with accountants and deliver actionable outputs
• Own budget vs. actuals, rolling forecasts, cash runway and headcount planning
• Develop unit economics at client and case level to show margin drivers
• Support fundraising efforts, investor updates, and board reporting

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. 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. We're hiring a Strategic Finance & Operations Lead to be the first dedicated finance hire at Alma — and, just as importantly, the person who becomes the glue across our operations. You'll sit next to our CEO, own the numbers end to end, and fix the unglamorous things that are quietly slowing the company down. This is a builder's seat, not an analyst's seat. You will own our finance function, bring structure to legal and internal operations, and design the systems we'll need six and twelve months from now — not just the ones we need this month. Two things to be honest about up front. First, this role is roughly half strategic and half in-the-weeds; the in-the-weeds half is what makes the strategic half credible. Second, plenty of people take a seat like this for two or three years and then head to business school or a bigger finance org. That's a completely legitimate reason to apply. We'd rather have a sharp person for two great years than a lukewarm one for five.

What You'll Do

Strategic Finance (~50%)

• Own the model and the money
• Build and own Alma's financial model end to end — the analytical engine we use to make decisions
• Run the monthly cycle: close in partnership with our accountants, reconcile, and turn the output into something leadership can act on within days, not weeks
• Own budget vs. actuals, rolling forecasts, cash management, and runway — and flag problems a quarter before they arrive
• Build and maintain unit economics at the case and client level, so we always know where margin comes from and what's eroding it
• Own headcount planning and the hiring ledger as we scale the attorney, paralegal, and GTM base
• Support the raise and the board
• Own monthly investor updates and quarterly board reporting alongside the CEO
• Partner on our next fundraise: build the data room, own the diligence workstreams, and be the person who can answer any question about our numbers in the room
• Bring rigor to commercial decisions
• Pricing: model deal structures, discounting, and creative pricing so we win on quality without giving away margin
• Compensation and commissions: pressure-test the plans our Sales Ops lead calculates, and model the cost of any change before we make it
• Build/buy/outsource analysis as we decide what to automate, what to staff, and what to hand to specialists

Business Operations (~50%)

• Be the glue
• Own internal and legal operations: find the processes that are broken, duplicated, or being run by the wrong team — and fix them
• Partner with our Head of Legal and Head of Product to decide what should become a process, what should be automated, and what should simply stop
• Own the connective work between legal, sales, and client success that currently has no owner
• Build the rules
• Write the spend and approval policies we don't have yet — budget requests, discretionary spend, vendor onboarding — so these become decisions with a rule behind them instead of one-off Slack asks
• Manage AR/AP oversight and the outsourced finance stack (bookkeeping, IOLTA reconciliation, audit support). You coordinate the specialists; you're not the one doing the bookkeeping
• Design the reporting cadence, dashboards, and metric definitions the company runs on
• Write the playbooks so the next five people in operations inherit a system instead of tribal knowledge
• Vendor and tooling consolidation, procurement, and cost optimization across the company
• Office and real estate decisions, market and comp benchmarking, and whatever the highest-stakes open question is that month
• Employee onboarding and offboarding operations

What this role is not:

you won't own sales ops (that sits with our Sales Ops lead), and you won't be doing daily bookkeeping or IOLTA reconciliation (both handled by specialists)

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. We work closely across functions and care deeply about the people we serve. Our conviction is that great attorneys make a client's experience great — and that our job in product and operations is to free them from everything that isn't their client.

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.