Strategic Finance Associate

Parasail•San Francisco, CA

11h

About The Position

Parasail is redefining AI infrastructure by enabling seamless deployment across a distributed network of GPUs, optimizing for cost, performance, and flexibility. Our mission is to empower AI developers with a fast, cost-efficient, and scalable cloud experience, free from vendor lock-in and designed for the next generation of AI workloads. About the Role We're looking for a Strategic Finance Associate to help shape the commercial and capital decisions behind Parasail's growth. You'll build the financial models that guide customer contracts, GPU investments, pricing, and fleet strategy. Our models are live systems that pull from our own infrastructure, billing, and CRM data through MCP connections, built and maintained inside agentic tools like Claude Code. You don't need to be an engineer, but you should already work this way and be productive in our stack from week one. Working closely with finance leadership and partners across sales, engineering, and operations, you'll connect how the platform runs, including capacity, utilization, and performance, to revenue, margins, and returns on invested capital. This is a highly visible role with meaningful ownership from day one. Your analysis will directly inform negotiations, resource allocation, and strategic decisions in one of technology's fastest-growing and most capital-intensive markets.

Requirements

2 to 6 years of experience in investment banking, management consulting, private equity, strategic finance, or FP&A at a high-growth technology company
Daily, proactive use of agentic AI tools such as Claude Code, including working with MCP connections to pull data from source systems. You should be able to walk us through models, systems, or workflows you've built this way.
Exceptional financial modeling skills, with the ability to build clean, flexible, assumption-driven models from a blank sheet and defend the reasoning behind every number
Strong analytical judgment and structured problem-solving skills, including comfort working with ambiguity and imperfect data
The ability to distill complex analysis into concise, actionable recommendations for executives and cross-functional partners
A high degree of ownership, initiative, and attention to detail
The ability to move quickly and operate effectively in a fast-paced startup environment
Genuine interest in AI infrastructure, cloud economics, or capital-intensive business models

Nice To Haves

Experience with cloud infrastructure, data centers, GPUs, semiconductors, or another hardware-intensive business
Familiarity with capital-equipment financing, asset-backed structures, or lease accounting
Working knowledge of SQL or Python for data analysis
Experience with usage-based or consumption-based pricing models
Experience building internal tools or automations outside your formal job description

Responsibilities

Evaluate customer contracts and commercial opportunities.
Build and maintain financial models that assess deal structures, margins, payback periods, and risk.
Translate your analysis into clear recommendations that support commercial negotiations.
Underwrite GPU investments.
Model GPU purchase decisions, including lease-versus-buy scenarios, financing structures, utilization assumptions, useful life, residual value, and return on invested capital.
Shape pricing strategy.
Analyze unit economics across products, workloads, and hardware types.
Benchmark Parasail's offerings against the market and model the revenue, margin, and customer implications of pricing changes.
Improve fleet economics.
Track utilization, cost, and profitability by GPU type and data center.
Identify opportunities to improve deployment decisions, capacity allocation, and fleet-level returns.
Build the systems behind the numbers.
Use AI tooling to stand up the models, queries, and internal tools that turn our usage, billing, and infrastructure data into financial output, and automate the recurring work worth eliminating.
Connect operating performance to financial outcomes.
Develop dashboards and recurring reporting that link operational metrics, including capacity, utilization, and tokens served, to revenue, margins, cash flow, and capital efficiency.
Support planning and strategic decisions.
Contribute to forecasting, budgeting, investor reporting, and high-priority analyses for finance leadership and the executive team.
Work across the business.
Partner closely with sales, engineering, and operations to ensure your models reflect how the business actually operates and can be used to make real-world decisions.