Strategic Finance Lead

ABOUT US At Sierra, we’re building a platform to enable every company in the world to build better, more human customer experiences with AI. We partner with industry leaders such SoftBank, Uber, Rivian, CLEAR, and Sutter Health. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia. We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do. Our co-founders are Bret Taylor https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettaylor/ and Clay Bavor https://www.linkedin.com/in/claybavor/. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace. WHAT YOU’LL DO As the Strategic Finance Lead, you'll drive key processes that help translate Sierra’s strategy into a financial plan and measure performance against it. Build and maintain forecasts, budgets, and models that help leaders understand where the business is, where it's going, and what tradeoffs they face. This is a high-ownership IC role for a builder who is energized by ambiguity and wants their fingerprints on how a high-growth AI company understands and drives its business. - Planning and Forecasting: Develop and drive key components of our financial planning and forecasting processes (e.g., revenue, cost of sales, GTM, R&D, capex and IDSW). Collaborate closely with Corporate FP&A to ensure revenue and cost forecasts integrate cleanly into the consolidated financial plan, board reporting, and budget vs. actuals (BvA) packages. - Performance Insights and Business Partnership: Support the monthly and quarterly close cycle from an FP&A perspective, including BvA and variance commentary. Develop and track the unit economics framework: LTV, CAC, CAC payback, LTV:CAC, and contribution margin by segment. Deliver actionable insights by connecting revenue, cost, and unit economic trends into a coherent view of business performance. - Data Infrastructure and Process: Build and own the data pipelines and reporting frameworks that underpin revenue and cost analytics, working with the appropriate teams to ensure clean, reliable inputs. Develop repeatable processes, templates, and documentation for all owned workstreams, with a bias toward automation and an AI-native approach to financial operations - Cross Functional Partnership: Drive cross-functional alignment on goals, building stakeholder buy-in, and enabling effective decision-making and execution across the organization. WHAT YOU’LL BRING - 8+ years of total experience, including meaningful time in a Strategic Finance, FP&A, or investment role at a high-growth technology company, and exposure to investment banking, private equity, venture capital, or an equivalent analytical finance environment - Deep fluency in SaaS and ARR-based business models: you can build a bottoms-up ARR bridge, decompose NRR into its drivers, model cohort retention, and explain the unit economics of an enterprise software business. - Direct experience building revenue models and customer analytics datasets in a SaaS or cloud business, including customer-level or segment-level ARR analysis. - Exceptional financial modeling skills, with the ability to build complex, multi-driver models from scratch in Google Sheets, including scenario frameworks, sensitivity analysis, and dynamic forecast structures. - Strong business partnership skills: you can sit in a room with leaders acros…