Member of Operations Staff, Strategic Finance

Odyssey•Palo Alto, CA

About The Position

Odyssey is an AI lab pioneering general world models: causal, multimodal systems that learn to predict and interact with the world over long horizons. This foundational technology promises to revolutionize robotics, science, healthcare, education, gaming, defense, and beyond. Odyssey’s founders previously pioneered the most complex application of physical AI: self-driving cars. They’ve now brought together a world-class research team from DeepMind, Tesla, Waymo, Meta, Apple, and Wayve, who have made significant contributions to language models (DeepMind Gemini), video models (DeepMind Veo), world models (Wayve GAIA), and autonomous systems (Tesla FSD). Odyssey has raised significant venture capital from GV, Amazon, AMD, EQT, NVIDIA, Natural Capital, In-Q-In, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Guillermo Rauch, Garry Tan, Kyle Vogt, and researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, MSL, Recursive, and Thinking Machines. Odyssey is building general-purpose world models; causal, interactive, real-time simulations and compute is the lifeblood of the company. We're looking for a strategic finance professional to build the financial engine of a fast-scaling, compute-intensive AI business: capital allocation, forecasting under extreme uncertainty, unit economics, and the capital narrative.

Requirements

Deep experience in capital-intensive or infrastructure-heavy sectors (scaled AI companies, hyperscalers, neoclouds, or big labs).
Comfortable making large, irreversible capital decisions under deep uncertainty.
Strong capital-markets track record with sophisticated investors and boards.
Deep command of unit economics, margin, and forecasting without false precision.
An excellent communicator who makes complex economics legible to investors, the board, and internal teams.

Nice To Haves

Background in AI/compute/cloud infrastructure or semiconductor procurement
Scaling a finance team through hypergrowth
Time at a frontier lab or neocloud/hyperscaler

Responsibilities

Own the financial engine of Odyssey’s compute-intensive business, operating as a strategic lead for compute and capital-allocation strategy.
Drive compute acquisition and procurement, negotiating deal terms for multi-hundred-million-scale commitments while balancing frontier ambition against balance-sheet risk.
Shape financial strategy for major long-term investments, capital structure decisions, and broader strategic decision-making.
Build rigorous financial models and scalable frameworks to evaluate strategic initiatives, funding options, tradeoffs, and risk.
Structure and help execute complex strategic initiatives in partnership with cross-functional teams.
Translate ambiguous technical and business inputs into decision-ready materials for leadership, the board, and investors, making the company's economics credible and legible.
Lead high-priority, cross-functional workstreams from concept through execution, bringing strong judgment, ownership, and communication in fast-moving situations.
Build a 0-1 AI-native finance organization, establishing the controls, reporting, and liquidity management appropriate for lumpy, large-scale capital commitments.
Work closely with the executive and technical teams and support and partner with compute procurement and strategy lead with the allocation of capacity between training and inference, the company's primary capital deployment decision.
Manage multi-year, multi-hundred-million-scale compute commitments, balancing frontier ambition against balance sheet.
Build and own financial models for exponential, non-linear growth, planning across a cone of uncertainty rather than a single forecast.
Understand and model unit economics of training and serving models, and partner on pricing across platform/API and application offerings.
Build the narrative, models, and diligence for capital raises, and support investor, partner, and board relationships.
Partner on pricing strategy across platform/API and application offerings while owning gross margin and model unit economics.