Strategic Finance Lead

Overview Inferact's mission is to grow vLLM as the world's AI inference engine and accelerate AI progress by making inference cheaper and faster. Founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM, we sit at the intersection of models and hardware, a position that took years to build. About the Role We're looking for a Strategic Finance Lead to help shape how Inferact grows, invests, and scales. You'll turn questions about inference economics, pricing, commercial opportunities, compute spending, and hiring into rigorous financial models and clear recommendations. This is a hands-on role for someone who can move from an ambiguous business question to the underlying data, build the analysis themselves, and help leadership make a better decision. You'll partner closely with founders, engineering, infrastructure, go-to-market, People, and the Corporate Controller to evaluate growth and investment priorities, understand customer and product profitability, and make resource tradeoffs explicit. Alongside this strategic work, you'll own the operating model, budgeting, rolling forecasts, headcount and expense planning, and cash runway scenarios. You'll also support board discussions and fundraising with clear financial narratives and decision materials. The Controller will own accounting and reliable actuals; you'll translate those inputs into a forward-looking view of the business and practical recommendations. Skills and Qualifications Minimum qualifications: - Experience personally owning strategic finance, business planning, or financial analysis for a growing technology business, with evidence that your work influenced operating or investment decisions. - Strong financial modeling skills, including driver-based revenue and expense forecasts, headcount plans, and the ability to connect the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow. - Commercial and operating judgment: you can evaluate unit economics, investment returns, pricing, and resource allocation while making assumptions and uncertainty explicit. - Ability to reconcile plans with accounting actuals, explain performance variances, and distinguish changes in business performance from timing, data, or modeling issues. - Advanced spreadsheet and analytical skills, with the ability to combine financial and operational data into models that others can inspect, maintain, and use. - Strong communication and business-partnering skills, including the ability to challenge assumptions constructively and explain financial tradeoffs to technical and non-financial leaders. - Comfort owning ambiguous finance projects end-to-end, balancing strategic analysis with recurring planning and forecasting, and prioritizing useful decisions over unnecessary process. Preferred qualifications: - Experience with AI infrastructure, cloud platforms, developer tools, usage-based software, or businesses where infrastructure cost and customer consumption materially affect margins. - Experience partnering with engineering and infrastructure teams on compute costs, capacity commitments, utilization, and the financial implications of different deployment models. - Experience preparing board reporting, fundraising models, investor analyses, or decision materials for senior leadership. - Experience planning for a distributed or international organization, including headcount, hiring timing, and geographic cost differences. - Experience improving planning systems, dashboards, data integrations, or automated reporting; SQL or lightweight scripting is helpful but not required. Bonus points if you have: - Built strategic finance models, decision processes, or a planning foundation before a company had an established finance operating cadence. - Connected product usage, infrastructure costs, and commercial terms to customer or product profitability and influenced a concrete business decision. - Improved forecast quality and management visibility without slowing execution or requiring a large finance team. - Built trusted, self-service financial reporting or used automation to reduce repetitive analysis while preserving review and data quality. Logistics - Location: This role is based in San Francisco, California and is on-site. - Compensation: The compensation package, including base salary and equity terms, is to be determined based on the final role scope, background, skills, and experience. - Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas on a case-by-case basis. - Benefits: Inferact offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits as well as 401(k) company match.