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TRM Labs is hiring a Strategic Finance Lead for R&D to partner with the CTO and R&D leadership on financial strategy for AI, cloud, and compute infrastructure investments. You will report to the Head of Strategic Finance and FP&A and own the financial architecture for R&D from the ground up.
Key responsibilities include:
- Build an AI-assisted, driver-based economic model connecting usage and billing data across hundreds of SKUs to forecasts and investment decisions, shaping how TRM invests in AI, cloud, and compute.
- Lower R&D costs as a percentage of revenue without slowing product velocity by using AI to surface optimization opportunities in infrastructure spend and partnering with Engineering to act on them.
- Define TRM's AI spend strategy with the Head of AI, using AI-powered analysis to track spend against ROI by tool and workload and recommend where to commit, consolidate, or build.
- Own planning, forecasting, and the headcount capacity model for R&D, with automated workflows that flag risks early.
- Lead investment cases from business case through decision to measurement, with AI-assisted scenario analysis that clarifies tradeoffs.
- Turn R&D performance into clear executive and board narratives: what changed, why, and which decisions should follow.
- Rebuild R&D finance around AI, automation, and Pigment to shift time from assembling reports to shaping decisions.
You'll work in a small, high-leverage Strategic Finance team that collaborates directly with TRM's leadership on planning and company-wide strategy. The role is built to scale with its owner; using AI and automation, you can expand what one person owns, and as the mandate grows there may be an opportunity to build a team. You'll have substantial ownership from day one, direct exposure to the CTO and executive team, and room to shape how R&D finance operates.
TRM is a Series C company with $220M in total funding, backed by Goldman Sachs, Bessemer, Y Combinator, Thoma Bravo, and others. Headquartered in San Francisco, TRM operates as a distributed-first company with hubs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C., London, and Singapore. TRM provides AI-powered intelligence solutions that help public and private sector agencies investigate and disrupt crime.
The company moves quickly with high velocity and high ownership expectations. People who thrive here are energized by hard problems, experimentation, and continuous feedback. The work sits at the intersection of AI, national security, and fighting crime, with complex problems and real stakes. Expect priorities and targets to change quickly, work requiring high degrees of ambiguity, personal ownership and accountability, close cross-functional collaboration, and frequent communication.
Within your first 30 days, you'll deliver an initial AI-assisted cloud forecast focused on GCP with AWS coverage. Within 60 days, you'll present a defined AI spend strategy to the CTO. Within 90 days, the R&D capacity model will be integrated into the planning process.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 7+ years across strategic finance, FP&A, business operations, or a related role (complexity and influence matter more than exact years)
- Record of owning consequential work end to end: 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, and experience partnering with Engineering, Product, Data, AI, or Infrastructure leaders
- Judgment and communication skills to become a trusted partner to senior technical leaders, challenge assumptions constructively, and explain financial implications in plain language
- Applied AI fluency: demonstrated use of AI to improve speed or quality of modeling, research, or recurring workflows, with ability to check reliability of AI output
- Curiosity to learn technical systems quickly and translate how AI products and modern infrastructure scale into financial insight
- AI fluency is a baseline expectation at TRM; you should be among the top 10% of operators in your function in how you apply AI to accelerate workflows, structure and solve problems, improve output quality, and increase speed and leverage
