Head of FP&A

Clair•New York, NY

10d•Hybrid

About The Position

You own the operating model. The whole thing. Revenue, expenses, headcount, unit economics. When the CEO asks "What happens to margin if we launch this product at this price," your model answers that question in hours, not days. When the board asks why we missed forecast, you already know and have a view on what to do about it. You report to the VP of Finance. He’s not handing you the model and walking away. He stays close to the numbers, stress-tests assumptions, and works in the model alongside you when the stakes are high. He leads the strategic finance agenda (fundraising, pricing strategy, capital allocation, company operating cadence, investor relations) and you build the analytical foundation underneath those decisions. The difference is altitude: you own the model day-to-day, he pressure-tests it and uses it to drive the biggest calls. Clair provides on-demand pay to hourly workers through embedded partnerships with large payroll and time platforms like Gusto, Intuit QuickBooks, BambooHR, Connecteam, and 7shifts. The business has real complexity: multi-partner unit economics, cohort-based lending dynamics, credit risk, and a product surface that’s expanding. If you want a job where the model is a static spreadsheet you update once a quarter, this isn’t it.

Requirements

5-8+ years. Ideally a combination of IB, PE, or consulting foundation. At least 2+ years owning FP&A or strategic finance at a growth-stage startup (Series B through D)
You’ve built or rebuilt a company operating model, not just inherited a clean one and updated it
Experience supporting a fundraise. Data rooms, investor models, fielding questions
You can model across business types: transaction-based, SaaS, lending/credit
Excel/Sheets, SQL, Pigment, or Anaplan. Pigment preferred
You can write a board memo on our growth trajectory and walk a Data Analyst through our margin profile in the same afternoon.
You’ve managed or mentored at least one person
Bachelor’s in Finance, Economics, Accounting, or STEM

Nice To Haves

Fintech experience, especially earned wage access, lending, or payments
You’ve modeled credit risk, default curves, or loan-level economics
You’ve built financial infrastructure at a company that was scaling faster than it was organizing
You’re at home navigating and constructing relational databases.
You can build your own dashboards (Tableau, Pigment, Sheets)

Responsibilities

Build, maintain, and defend Clair’s consolidated operating model
Run the annual budget process end-to-end. Bottoms-up plans with every department, reconciled to top-down targets
Maintain weekly rolling forecasts. You’re the first person to know when something is off and you turn that into action, not just insight
Variance analysis that says something. Not "Revenue was $50K below plan" but "Revenue was $50K below plan because partner X’s conversion dropped 15% after their app update, and here’s what we should do"
Own the reporting cadence: monthly reviews, QBRs, board materials
Build the models behind fundraising: investor decks, data rooms, due diligence answers
Model new product economics before we build anything. What are the unit economics? What’s the break-even?
Pricing and take-rate analysis for new and existing partnerships
Be the VP of Finance’s go-to analytical partner on big-picture questions
Product team says engagement is up. Partnerships says a new population is onboarding. Data science says default rates are shifting. You’re the one who turns those inputs into a coherent financial picture
Translate model outputs into plain English for people who don’t live in spreadsheets
Make sure the model matches reality. Partner with accounting on close. If actuals and forecast diverge, figure out why
Build processes that scale. Automate the stuff that should be automated. Know when a human needs to look at the number. Evolve our processes and tools to be AI-native and generating maximum operating leverage
Own the tooling: Pigment, dashboards, reporting infrastructure