Strategic Finance Senior Associate | Climate Tech and Energy Transition Startups

Planetary Scale; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Performance bonus

Shadow client equity

401K with match

30 days PTO

Job summary

Planetary Scale seeks a Strategic Finance Senior Associate to partner with climate-tech founders, building complex models and conducting market analysis. You’ll support fundraising, prepare reports for boards, and ensure clean financials across a portfolio of emerging companies.

This role is remote with travel to client sites and NYC for Climate Week, offering a bonus, shadow equity, and a strong benefits package.

Qualifications

• 3–6 years of experience in MBB, IB, or a comparable analytical background.
• Strong financial modeling skills and analytical rigor with clean logic.
• Ability to learn quickly, navigate ambiguity, and work with founders.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain three-statement models, scenario analyses, and KPI dashboards.
• Support fundraising across equity, venture debt, and grants with pitch materials and data rooms.
• Lead budgeting, benchmarking, KPI tracking, and proactive issue identification.
• Prepare investor and board reporting with clear, accurate communication.
• Oversee back-office finance processes for clients and develop sector insights.

Skills

Financial modeling

Analytical reasoning

Market research

Fundraising support

Tools

Excel

Job description

• Role: Support climate tech founders with financial modeling, analysis, research, and finance ops.
• Preferred experience: 3–6 years (MBB, IB, or comparable analytical background)
• Compensation: $120,000–$150,000 base + performance bonus + shadow client equity + benefits
• Expected start: Dec '26 or Jan '27

Overview

Planetary Scale partners with climate and energy-transition companies as their strategic finance arm, working alongside founders from seed through growth. We've helped them raise hundreds of millions in venture funding and get through the hardest moments on the path to scale.

The climate tech founders we work with are navigating some of the most consequential decisions on the company-building journey: which business model to pursue, how to deploy scarce capital, when to raise and on what terms. We're hiring a Strategic Finance Senior Associate to own the analytical work behind those decisions and grow into a trusted advisor to the founders who rely on it.

The Role

You’ll work across a portfolio of climate tech companies, supporting our engagement leads and partnering directly with founders and their teams. The context shifts regularly — a battery company one week, a carbon‑neutral advanced materials company the next — but the core pillars of the work remain the same: building advanced models, analyzing complex data, researching markets, and making sense of the numbers to support the decisions founders make and the conversations they have with their boards and investors.

You’ll be in real client work from the start, building alongside experienced members of the team and taking ownership of your own workstreams fast. Pretty quickly, you become the person a founder counts on to get the numbers right.

• You will build and maintain three‑statement models, scenario analyses, and KPI dashboards that founders use to steer their companies and bring into their most important conversations.
• You will support fundraising across equity, venture debt, and grants — contributing to pitch materials, data rooms, diligence responses, and round structuring.
• You will run the financial analysis that gives founders clarity — budgeting, benchmarking, KPI tracking, and the kind of proactive digging that finds issues before they become problems.
• You will prepare investor and board reporting that communicates performance accurately and clearly.
• For clients whose finance function we run, you'll monitor finance back office processes such as bookkeeping, accounts payable, invoicing, and payroll to ensure high‑quality delivery.
• You will research sectors and business models across the climate and energy transition, developing real expertise that sharpens the advice we give.

About You

You hold yourself to a high standard — and you want to work somewhere that does the same. A few things that matter here:

• You learn fast across unfamiliar domains. Working across multiple climate tech companies in different verticals means the context shifts constantly. Everything we do is analytical and rigorous, but the subject matter evolves fast. That requires someone genuinely energized by learning, not just willing to do it.
• Accuracy is your baseline. Our work directly informs high‑stakes decisions — a wrong number can undermine a founder's credibility at the worst possible moment. Stress‑testing every number is second nature to you.
• You take ownership by default. When something needs doing, you do it — whether that's digging into why a number looks off or rolling up your sleeves on the detail work. You ask “What are we missing?” and “How could this go wrong?” rather than hoping things work out, and no task is too small when the team needs it.
• You think before you build. The most valuable thing you produce isn't a deliverable — it's the thinking behind it. You pause to understand the real problem and ask the question others skip.
• You make the people around you more effective. Whether that's a founder or a teammate, you simplify complexity, anticipate needs, and make someone's day easier.

Beyond that, for this role specifically:

• You have serious analytical and modeling horsepower. You build models with clean structure, clear assumptions, and defensible logic — and you can turn complex analysis into a clear recommendation. This level of fluency typically comes from MBB‑type strategy consulting, investment banking, or a comparable analytical environment.
• You communicate clearly under scrutiny. You can build a presentation that holds up in a board room and walk a founder through it with confidence. Strong written and verbal communication is a must.
• You care about this work specifically. You've decided impact is a first‑order consideration, not a nice‑to‑have. You're drawn to climate and the energy transition because it's humanity's biggest challenge, and you want your analytical skills deployed where they'll make the biggest difference.

It helps if you've also worked with venture‑backed startups before, have exposure to fundraising from either side of the table, bring working knowledge of finance and accounting frameworks, or are excited about building with AI to improve how we work. Your prior experience gives you a strong foundation, but what will make you successful here is the ability to learn quickly, navigate ambiguity, and solve novel problems from first principles.

What makes this different

• Working directly with founders. You'll work with people building some of the most consequential companies in climate and energy — exposure and ownership that typically takes far longer to reach at a larger firm.
• A steep curve and a supportive team. Hands‑on work alongside experienced team members, frequent and direct feedback, and real client exposure from day one. We hold a high bar and invest seriously in getting you there.
• A share in the upside. Our shadow client equity program gives you a long‑term stake in the financial success of the companies you help build — one of the most distinctive things about working here.

We're fully remote with occasional travel to client sites and to NYC for Climate Week each September. Our offer includes performance bonus, client equity exposure, 401K with match, and 30 days of PTO.

Planetary Scale is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate candidates on their merits and welcome applications from people of all backgrounds.