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Inferact, founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM, is building the world's AI inference engine. The company sits at the intersection of models and hardware, positioned to accelerate AI progress by making inference cheaper and faster.
You will serve as Strategic Finance Lead, partnering closely with founders, engineering, infrastructure, go-to-market, People, and the Corporate Controller. This is a hands-on role that combines strategic financial analysis with operational planning.
Key responsibilities include:
• Translate ambiguous business questions about inference economics, pricing, commercial opportunities, compute spending, and hiring into rigorous financial models and clear recommendations
• Own the operating model, budgeting, rolling forecasts, headcount and expense planning, and cash runway scenarios
• Evaluate growth and investment priorities, understand customer and product profitability, and make resource tradeoffs explicit
• Support board discussions and fundraising with clear financial narratives and decision materials
• Reconcile plans with accounting actuals, explain performance variances, and distinguish changes in business performance from timing, data, or modeling issues
• Build and maintain financial models that others can inspect, maintain, and use
• Partner with engineering and infrastructure teams on compute costs, capacity commitments, and deployment model implications
The Controller will own accounting and reliable actuals; you will translate those inputs into a forward-looking view of the business and practical recommendations. This role balances strategic analysis with recurring planning and forecasting, prioritizing useful decisions over unnecessary process.
REQUIREMENTS:
Minimum qualifications:
• Demonstrated experience personally owning strategic finance, business planning, or financial analysis for a growing technology business, with evidence that your work influenced operating or investment decisions
• Strong financial modeling skills, including driver-based revenue and expense forecasts, headcount plans, and ability to connect income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow
• Commercial and operating judgment to evaluate unit economics, investment returns, pricing, and resource allocation while making assumptions and uncertainty explicit
• Ability to reconcile plans with accounting actuals, explain performance variances, and distinguish business performance changes from timing or data issues
• Advanced spreadsheet and analytical skills to combine financial and operational data into maintainable models
• Strong communication and business-partnering skills, including ability to challenge assumptions constructively and explain financial tradeoffs to technical and non-financial leaders
• Comfort owning ambiguous finance projects end-to-end
Preferred qualifications:
• Experience with AI infrastructure, cloud platforms, developer tools, usage-based software, or businesses where infrastructure cost and customer consumption materially affect margins
• Experience partnering with engineering and infrastructure teams on compute costs, capacity commitments, utilization, and deployment model financial implications
• Experience preparing board reporting, fundraising models, investor analyses, or decision materials for senior leadership
• Experience planning for distributed or international organizations, including headcount, hiring timing, and geographic cost differences
• Experience improving planning systems, dashboards, data integrations, or automated reporting; SQL or lightweight scripting helpful but not required
Bonus:
• Built strategic finance models or planning foundation before a company had established finance operating cadence
• Connected product usage, infrastructure costs, and commercial terms to customer or product profitability and influenced concrete business decisions
• Improved forecast quality and management visibility without slowing execution or requiring large finance team
• Built trusted, self-service financial reporting or used automation to reduce repetitive analysis
