Controller

AirGarage•San Francisco, CA

8d•$200,000 - $250,000•Remote

About The Position

As our Controller, you'll be the architect and owner of AirGarage's accounting function, the person who makes our numbers unimpeachable. You'll lead our in-house accounting team, modernize our systems and processes, and build the financial foundation that a fast-scaling, capital-intensive, real-world business demands. This is a builder's role, not a maintainer's role. Money moves through our platform every day: collected from drivers, split with property owners, taxed by dozens of jurisdictions. Our accounting has to keep pace with a business that gets more complex every quarter. You'll take us from scrappy to scalable: converting our books to full accrual accounting, leading our migration from QuickBooks to a modern ERP, rebuilding the chart of accounts, tightening the close, and getting us audit-ready. You'll report to our CEO today and to finance leadership as the team grows. This is the cornerstone accounting seat at AirGarage: the person every future finance hire will be glad came before them. If you love the craft of accounting, if clean books, tight controls, and a fast close are things you take genuine pride in, this is a rare chance to build the whole thing your way, at a company where the work actually matters to how the business is run and is critical to the end product delivered to customers.

Requirements

Deep technical accounting chops: CPA (or equivalent rigor) with real command of GAAP, especially revenue recognition for transactional or marketplace-style businesses. You know the standards and, more importantly, how to apply them pragmatically.
You've done the messy middle before: You've been the senior-most accounting owner (Controller, Assistant Controller, or Director of Accounting) at a venture-backed company as it scaled through rapid growth and you personally did the work, not just supervised it.
ERP migration experience: You've led (not observed) a move off QuickBooks onto a modern ERP. You know where these projects go wrong and how to land them on time.
Cash-to-accrual conversion experience: You've taken a company's books from cash-basis or hybrid to full accrual and lived to tell the tale.
Audit experience: You've prepared a company for and taken it through financial statement audits. Ideally its first one, which is a different animal than its fifth.
Systems thinker: You're comfortable working alongside data teams, wielding a data pipeline, and designing processes where the system of record does the work instead of a spreadsheet. You'd rather automate a reconciliation than perform one.
Hands-on operator: You'll design the close checklist at 10am and personally clear a gnarly reconciliation at 2pm. A lean team means the Controller still touches the work every day.
Complexity is your comfort zone: Multi-location, multi-jurisdiction, revenue-share, or payments-heavy business exposure. If your entire career is clean single-entity SaaS subscription revenue, this business will surprise you daily.
Pride in the craft: You genuinely love accounting done right. Your ambition is to be an exceptional Controller and build an exceptional accounting org and you see a growing finance function around you as a feature, not a threat.
Bias for action: You move fast, fix root causes instead of symptoms, and know when "80/20 and shipping" beats "perfect and late." Accounting should make the company faster and more confident, never slower.

Nice To Haves

Big Four or top regional firm foundation plus startup operating experience (one without the other is a yellow flag)
Indirect tax / sales tax / regulatory fee experience across many jurisdictions
Experience with payment processors and marketplace money movement
Familiarity with modern accounting tools and automation

Responsibilities

Own the books, end to end: Lead the monthly close and continuously shorten it. Own revenue recognition, reconciliations, AP/AR, payroll coordination, and the integrity of every number that rolls up to the P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow statement.
Convert us to true accrual accounting: Design and implement proper GAAP revenue recognition for a transactional, multi-location, revenue-share business. Make the accounting reflect economic reality, not just cash movement.
Lead the ERP migration: Own our transition from QuickBooks to a modern ERP as your flagship first project: selection, implementation, data migration, integrations with our payments and data infrastructure, and change management with the team.
Rebuild the chart of accounts: Rationalize our account structure so that location-level, team-level, and corporate reporting all roll up cleanly and leadership can trust every cut of the data.
Connect accounting to our data systems: We have rich, real-time transaction data flowing through our platform and data warehouse. Make our accounting systems and our operational systems agree with each other so there is one source of truth, automated wherever possible.
Own indirect tax and compliance: Manage parking taxes, regulatory fees, and multi-jurisdiction sales/use tax compliance across a national footprint of locations. Build the processes that keep us clean as we enter new markets.
Get us audit-ready: Establish the controls, documentation, and processes to take AirGarage through its first financial statement audit and make every audit after that boring.
Level up the team: Manage, mentor, and develop our in-house accountants. Set the standard for what excellent looks like and build the processes that let a lean team punch above its weight.
Partner across the business: Work with Operations, Sales, and Product to make sure the way we bill, collect, split, and report revenue is accurate at the source, not patched up at close.
Support financial reporting: Deliver timely, accurate monthly financials and supporting schedules that leadership, the board, and investors can rely on without an asterisk.

Benefits

Equity: Have a stake in the business that you’re helping to build and grow.
Work remotely: Live and work wherever you like! We believe in folks working where they are happiest and most productive. We currently hire teammates that are located anywhere within North America.
Health insurance: We offer health insurance and currently cover 85% of the cost of medical, dental, and vision plans for the primary employee and 50% of the cost of plans for dependents.
Parental Leave: We offer 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave to all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. The 12 weeks can be taken as a continuous leave or intermittently over the first 18 months of the child's life.
Home office setup: Get a laptop + additional equipment needed to set you up for success.
Time to recharge: We have an unlimited PTO policy with a minimum requirement of 10 days per year.
401k: Make financial planning right for you with a 401k retirement savings program.
Team Off-sites: ~2 times per year our team comes together for a full week in places like Tahoe, Charleston, San Diego, Park City, and Austin.
BookGarage: Our team loves to learn and grow together, so join us for our optional recurring book club.
Room to grow: Our team will be orders of magnitude larger within a few years; as a part of our foundational team, you'll have opportunities to grow with us.
Transform our cities: The opportunity to change the way that the world thinks about real estate use in our cities.
Work with a diverse team: At AirGarage, we've always been committed to building a thriving team that represents the communities we serve. Our team is currently 40% female and 30%+ from underrepresented communities.