Strategic Finance Senior Associate - Compute

Together AI•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

As a Strategic Finance Senior Associate at Together, you will own the cost side of our data center build-outs. Reporting to the Director of Strategic Finance, Infrastructure, you will be the financial counterpart to our Infrastructure Strategy team: building and maintaining the cost base for every deployment, validating that build-outs are tracking to plan, and helping evaluate the economics of the sites we take on next. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role at the center of the largest capital decisions the company makes. The ideal candidate has done this before: inside a hyperscaler, neocloud, colocation provider, or data center developer, or covering data centers from the investing side, and pairs real infrastructure fluency with exceptional financial rigor.

Requirements

4+ years of experience with substantive exposure to data center or large-scale infrastructure capex, via one of two paths: Operating side: finance, capex planning, or infrastructure strategy/FP&A at a hyperscaler, neocloud, colocation provider, data center developer, or another operator running large build-out programs Investing side: investment banking, infrastructure investing, or project finance with a data center / digital infrastructure focus, ideally paired with time in-house at an operator
Working knowledge of the cost stack of a data center build: non-recurring costs, hardware capex (GPUs, networking, storage), power and cooling, and ongoing operating costs, and how each flows through COGS, depreciation, and cash
Exceptional financial modeling skills, including site-level TCO and scenario analysis, with the ability to distill a complex build into the handful of drivers that actually move the outcome
Demonstrated ownership of budget-versus-actual for large capital projects, with the discipline to catch variances early and the credibility to drive them to resolution
Comfort working directly with technical partners: able to hold a substantive conversation with infrastructure engineers, translate it into a cost number, and communicate the result clearly to non-technical and non-financial audiences
Exceptional business judgment and intuition, with the creativity and problem-solving instincts to tackle novel questions where there is no established playbook
Strong work ethic and self-directed, with the ability to manage multiple workstreams under tight timelines and close attention to detail

Responsibilities

Own the cost base and cost forecast for Together's data center build-outs, spanning data center non-recurring costs, hardware capex across GPUs, networking, and storage, and ongoing operating costs
Validate that build-outs are tracking to plan: maintain budget-versus-actual against approved estimates, flag variances early with a clear read on the driver, and work with Infrastructure Strategy and Infrastructure Engineering to close them out
Maintain the all-in unit cost of owned capacity, on a dollars-per-GPU-hour basis by GPU type, as the source of truth used for pricing, margin, and capital allocation decisions
Partner with Infrastructure Strategy to evaluate new data center opportunities, building the economics for candidate sites including prepays, financing requirements, tax treatment and incentives, and total cost of ownership over the life of the site
Pressure-test hardware cost assumptions and surface savings opportunities with Infrastructure Engineering and Infrastructure Strategy, from equipment choices to storage sizing and cluster configuration trade-offs at different scales
Translate hardware delivery timelines and payment milestones maintained by Infrastructure Strategy into the cash forecast, and own tracking of prepays to hardware and data center suppliers, so that cash forecasting reflects real commitments
Build the reporting layer: dashboards and recurring processes that give leadership a current view of committed capital, spend to date, and forecast to complete, by site