Strategic Finance Lead, R&D

TRM Labs

1d•Remote

About The Position

TRM Labs is seeking a Strategic Finance Lead, AI & R&D to guide the company's investments in AI, cloud, and compute infrastructure, as well as the engineering capacity behind its products. This role serves as the dedicated finance partner to the CTO and R&D leadership, responsible for transforming complex data on usage, billing, and headcount into actionable recommendations for major investment decisions. Reporting to the Head of Strategic Finance and FP&A, the individual will design the financial architecture for R&D from the ground up, integrating AI into the operational workflow.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in strategic finance, FP&A, business operations, or a related field, with a focus on the complexity and influence of work owned.
A proven track record of owning consequential work end-to-end, including framing ambiguous questions, structuring analysis, forming a point of view, and driving recommendations to action.
Strong data-informed modeling skills, including driver-based forecasts, investment cases, and capacity models built from incomplete or complex data, accelerated with AI.
Hands-on experience analyzing cloud, compute, AI, or other usage-based technology costs.
Experience partnering with Engineering, Product, Data, AI, or Infrastructure leaders.
The judgment and communication skills to be a trusted partner to senior technical leaders, constructively challenge assumptions, and explain financial implications clearly.
Applied AI fluency, demonstrating the use of AI to improve the speed or quality of modeling, research, or recurring workflows, and the ability to assess AI output reliability.
Curiosity to quickly learn technical systems and translate how AI products and modern infrastructure scale into financial insights.

Responsibilities

Shape TRM's investments in AI, cloud, and compute by building an AI-assisted, driver-based economic model that connects usage and billing data across hundreds of SKUs to forecasts and decisions.
Lower R&D costs as a percentage of revenue without slowing product velocity, using AI to identify optimization opportunities in infrastructure spend and partnering with Engineering to implement them.
Define TRM's AI spend strategy with the Head of AI, utilizing AI-powered analysis to track spend against ROI by tool and workload, and recommending areas for commitment, consolidation, or building.
Provide R&D leaders with an early view of changes by owning planning, forecasting, and the headcount capacity model, incorporating automated workflows that flag risks with sufficient time for action.
Influence major infrastructure and R&D commitments by leading investment cases from business case development through decision and measurement, employing AI-assisted scenario analysis to clarify tradeoffs.
Translate R&D performance into a clear narrative for executives and the board, detailing changes, reasons, and recommended decisions.
Rebuild R&D finance around AI, automation, and Pigment to shift focus from report assembly to decision shaping.