Finance Manager

About Us Axelera AI https://www.axelera.ai is not your regular deep-tech startup. We are creating the next-generation AI platform to support anyone who wants to help advancing humanity and improve the world around us. In just four years, we have raised a total of $370 million and have built a world-class team of 220+ employees (including 49+ PhDs with more than 40,000 citations), both remotely from 18 different countries and with offices in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy, the UK, headquartered at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, Netherlands. We have also launched our Metis™ AI Platform, which achieves a 3-5x increase in efficiency and performance, and have visibility into a strong business pipeline exceeding $100 million. Our unwavering commitment to innovation has firmly established us as a global industry pioneer. Are you up for the challenge? Position Overview Axelera AI is a fast-growing, fabless AI semiconductor scale-up, headquartered in the Netherlands with operations across eight jurisdictions (NL, BE, FR, DE, IT, UK, CH, US). As we scale towards our next stage of growth, we're looking for an experienced Finance Manager to join our Finance team and take ownership of day-to-day financial control. This role sits between the VP Finance and the wider finance team (Payroll, AP, Treasury), acting as a senior point of escalation and quality control for financial operations across the group. Controls and compliance sit at the heart of this role. The Finance Manager operates and continuously strengthens the group’s internal financial control framework day to day, ensuring controls are consistently performed, evidenced and documented across all entities. Key responsibilities: - Own the monthly and annual close process across multiple jurisdictions, ensuring accuracy, timeliness and IFRS compliance - Operate, maintain and evidence the group’s internal financial control framework across all entities - performing, documenting and monitoring the controls, and surfacing control gaps and improvement opportunities - Take day-to-day ownership of financial compliance - statutory, regulatory and tax-filing obligations and adherence to group finance policies - maintaining a compliance calendar and escalating risks and exceptions - Act as a senior point of escalation for the Payroll Specialist, AP Lead and Financial Controller, reviewing their output and resolving complex queries - Support the relationship with our external auditors (Deloitte) and year-end audit fieldwork, including technical accounting memos - Oversee balance sheet reconciliations, intercompany accounting, and multi-entity consolidation - Support statutory filings and tax compliance across multiple entities, working alongside external advisors - Drive process improvement, and implement and embed enhancements that mature the group’s controls towards IPO readiness within the control framework - Own and optimise NetSuite as the group's core financial system, including new entity/subsidiary set-ups - Identify and implement opportunities to use AI tools to streamline finance processes, reporting and analysis, improving speed and accuracy across the function - Support ad hoc finance projects: new country set-ups, manufacturing cost accounting, and system implementations Qualifications: - Big 4 audit background, or several years' experience in a company that has gone through Big 4 audits - Proven experience in a fast-growing, multi-country scale-up environment (ideally with manufacturing or hardware exposure) - Hands-on NetSuite experience essential - Strong IFRS technical knowledge - Strong working knowledge of internal control frameworks and financial compliance, ideally gained in an IPO-readiness, listed-company or SOX / ICFR environment - Comfortable working with and leveraging AI tools to optimise and accelerate finance processes as the function scales - Based in the Netherlands, with willingness and ability to travel to our Eindhoven office 1–2 days per week - Comfo…