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UFORCE is a defence-technology company founded in Ukraine and headquartered in London, building uncrewed vessels, ground robotics, aircraft, autonomy software, and command-and-control systems. The company has recently raised significant funding and is scaling operations across Europe, the US, and Asia.
You will build and lead the FP&A function from the ground up, reporting to the CFO. Over the first six months, you will establish the function; over the following year, you will scale it by building and developing a small team. Your core mission is to turn company strategy into agreed targets, realistic budgets, clear spending priorities, and reliable reporting that enables the CFO and executive team to make decisions confidently.
Key responsibilities include:
- Build an integrated financial model from scratch, connecting pipeline, sales capacity, hiring, production, revenue timing, margins, investment, and cash. Maintain clean documentation, clear units and periods, and reconciliation checks; be able to explain and modify the model live.
- Work with the CFO and CEO to translate strategy into financial targets, then into annual budgets, monthly forecasts, and quarterly reviews, ensuring every budget has a clear basis.
- Run the full planning process: templates, deadlines, challenge sessions, consolidation, version control, and a repeatable forecasting calendar with named owners.
- Deliver monthly management and board reporting reconciled to actuals, explained against budget and forecast, with cash implications, risks, and recommendations. Flag which figures are final, provisional, or missing.
- Establish clear handover protocols with Accounting and Controlling, including required inputs, reconciliation checks, delivery dates, and escalation routes.
- Analyse product, contract, and customer economics with Manufacturing, Product, and Accounting, covering unit costs, gross margin, cohort performance, and margin drivers.
- Link sales forecasts to signed contracts, delivery milestones, revenue recognition, and customer receipts. Make government procurement timing and hardware/software delivery risks explicit.
- Track approved budgets against actual and committed spending, review hiring and investment cases for full cost capture, and maintain a rolling short-term cash forecast and runway view.
- Turn plan variances into clear recommendations on what to fund, defer, reduce, or stop. Maintain a decision log with decision needed, options, recommendation, approver, deadline, and blocked work.
- Review spending ratios and cost trends quarterly, investigate unusual movements, and recommend actions with owners and dates.
- Prepare board and investor financial content within agreed authority; keep the model and supporting evidence ready for future financing or due diligence.
- Hire, onboard, and develop a small FP&A team across locations. Set priorities, review quality, hold regular 1:1s, and build managers who resolve routine questions independently.
Requirements:
- Hands-on financial modelling: you have personally built a model from scratch that withstood investor scrutiny and can explain and test every assumption without preparation. You delegate components while maintaining ownership of model logic and final quality.
- Budgeting and funding experience: you have led or worked directly under the accountable lead on financial work for a major funding round, and have turned resulting strategy into targets, budgets, and corrective action. You can defend assumptions with boards and investors and maintain due-diligence evidence.
- Strong judgment on prioritization and decisions: you focus on decisions, deadlines, and cash risks that matter most, and get decisions made through concise options, recommendations, owners, and dates. You make a CFO's workload lighter rather than adding review layers.
- Business and spending judgment: you can challenge budgets constructively, expose omitted or duplicated costs, and distinguish healthy growth investment from structural margin or cash problems.
- Reporting discipline: you use reconciled figures, documented definitions, and controlled assumptions. You make data quality and cross-team dependencies visible, set owners and deadlines, and follow through without unnecessary bureaucracy.
- Commercial understanding of manufacturing, government or defence procurement, deployment costs, and multi-currency operations.
- People leadership: you have managed analysts, reviewed their work, set priorities, and developed independent owners. You address weak output through coaching and accountability.
- Hands-on, low ego, and direct, with comfort under scrutiny and with incomplete data. You work closely with operators and handle sensitive information responsibly.
- Willingness to check any AI-assisted output yourself and to change and explain the model live.
Nice-to-have: experience in defence, aerospace, hardware, or complex manufacturing; experience building an FP&A function in a fast-growing, post-funding company; experience working across multiple entities, countries, or distributed finance teams.
