Strategic Finance Lead

About us Garage powers the exchange of critical assets across America’s essential industries. We started with fire departments, where purchasing mission-critical vehicles and equipment used to take months of paperwork, phone calls, and delays. Our agentic platform automates the entire transaction: discovery, payments, freight, paperwork, warranty, and financing. What once took months now takes minutes. In under a year, we’ve expanded to cities and towns in all 50 states and grown revenue more than 10x. Based in New York, we’ve raised $18M from Y Combinator, Initialized Capital, Infinity Ventures, FJ Labs, and other leading investors. We’re moving fast, growing quickly, and just getting started.   About the role As Strategic Finance Lead, you will build the financial operating system that helps Garage scale a transaction-heavy marketplace with speed, discipline, and clarity. Reporting directly to the CEO, you’ll partner with the founders and functional leaders on the company’s most important decisions: where to invest, how to grow efficiently, how to measure marketplace health, and how to allocate capital as the business expands. This is a hands-on finance role for someone who wants to sit close to the business. You will own forecasting, planning, metrics, cash visibility, and investor-ready reporting, while partnering closely with the Senior Accountant to make sure clean actuals flow into the right operating decisions. The goal is not to add bureaucracy. The goal is to give Garage a sharper financial model, better decision-making cadence, and a clearer view of what drives durable growth. In this role, you will: - Build and own Garage’s operating model, including revenue, GMV, take rate, gross margin, burn, runway, headcount, and cash-flow forecasting. - Define and maintain the financial metrics that matter most for a marketplace business, turning transaction data into clear insights for founders, team leads, and investors. - Lead planning cycles across budgets, hiring plans, spend, and growth initiatives, helping the company understand the tradeoffs behind every major investment. - Monitor cash, runway, liquidity needs, and working capital dynamics across corporate operations and marketplace activity. - Build monthly and quarterly reporting packages that explain what is happening in the business, why it matters, and what decisions should follow. - Prepare investor materials, board updates, diligence support, and financing analyses as Garage grows. - Partner with the Accounting Lead on close outputs, transaction flows, funds movement, and reconciled actuals so planning and reporting stay grounded in reliable data. - Identify opportunities to improve margin, capital efficiency, vendor spend, and operating leverage without slowing the team down. - Build scalable finance systems, dashboards, metric definitions, and planning processes that can support Garage at its next stage and beyond. What we’re looking for - Thinks like an owner and wants to be in the room for the company’s most important financial and strategic decisions. - Enjoys building models that become operating tools, not static spreadsheets that only finance understands. - Gets energized by the complexity of a marketplace business, including transaction volume, money movement, financing, freight, margin, and customer behavior. - Can move quickly with imperfect information, make thoughtful assumptions, and clearly explain what would change the recommendation. - Brings a high bar for analytical rigor, but knows when a fast, useful answer is better than a perfect answer that arrives too late. - Communicates clearly with founders and functional leaders, translating messy data into practical decisions. - Wants to build the foundation for a finance function that can scale. Required - 5+ years experience in strategic finance, FP&A, finance and strategy, corporate finance, investment banking, private equity, consulting, business operations, or a finance role at a high-growth company. - Strong financial modeling skills, including the ability to build forecasts, scenario analyses, unit economics models, and cash-flow projections from scratch. - Strong understanding of startup operating metrics such as revenue growth, GMV, take rate, gross margin, contribution margin, burn, runway, CAC, payback, and operating leverage. - Experience partnering with senior leaders on budgets, headcount planning, resource allocation, performance reporting, or strategic initiatives. - Strong analytical judgment and comfort working with imperfect data across spreadsheets, dashboards, and operational systems. - Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to turn financial analysis into clear recommendations. - Comfort operating in ambiguity and taking ownership in a fast-moving, early-stage environment. Nice to have - Experience in marketplaces, fintech, payments, lending, logistics, government technology, or another transaction-heavy business. - Experience at a venture-backed startup, especially from Seed through Series B. - Experience supporting fundraising, board reporting, investor updates, data rooms, or strategic financing workstreams. - Experience with marketplace or usage-based economics, including GMV, take rate, liquidity, cohort performance, transaction margin, and working capital needs. - Experience using or implementing tools such as Ramp, Carta, or similar finance and analytics platforms. Our values - Growth oriented. We invest in people who grow as the company grows. We all should be constantly learning. - Humility. Everyone has a lot to give and a lot to learn. We believe in creating an environment where the best ideas win and acknowledging when we are wrong. - Customer focused. We have a genuine love for our customers. Customer success is our success. - Hack to success. We move fast and take big swings. We always aim for a solution that addresses 80% of the problem in 20% of the time. We make informed bets, launch quickly, and iterate. Why Garage? - Our product is something people use everyday to buy the equipment local communities everywhere depend on. - We’ve grown revenue over 10x in the last year and are well capitalized with $18M in funding raised total. - We have a talent-dense, high-performing team from Ramp, Twitter, Goldman Sachs, Bilt, Wise, Unify, Honey, PayPal, and more. - You’ll be one of our first 35 employees, operating as a foundational member of the team, partnering alongside the company’s founders. What we offer - Competitive salary and stock options - Health, dental and vision insurance (100% covered) - Unlimited paid time off every year (in addition to company observed holidays) - Daily lunch and dinner - $100 monthly wellness stipend - 401(k) with employer match - Pre-tax commuter benefits - Bi-annual team offsite - Relocation assistance