Strategic Finance Lead, R&D and AI Infrastructure

TRM Labs is hiring a Strategic Finance Lead for R&D and AI Infrastructure to partner with the CTO and R&D leadership on how the company invests in AI, cloud, compute infrastructure, and engineering capacity. You'll turn complex usage, billing, and headcount data into recommendations that shape major investment decisions, reporting to the Head of Strategic Finance and FP&A. This role is built to scale, with substantial ownership from day one and direct exposure to the executive team.

What you'll do

• Shape how TRM invests in AI, cloud, and compute by building an AI-assisted, driver-based economic model that connects usage and billing data across hundreds of SKUs to forecasts and decisions.
• Lower R&D costs as a percentage of revenue without slowing product velocity, 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 to recommend where to commit, consolidate, or build.
• Own planning, forecasting, and the headcount capacity model, with automated workflows that flag risks while there is still time to act, giving R&D leaders an early view of change.
• Lead investment cases from business case to decision to measurement, with AI-assisted scenario analysis that makes tradeoffs clear, influencing major infrastructure and R&D commitments.
• Turn R&D performance into a clear executive and board narrative: what changed, why, and which decisions should follow.
• Rebuild R&D finance around AI, automation, and Pigment so more time goes to shaping decisions and less to assembling reports.

What you bring

• 7+ years across strategic finance, FP&A, business operations, or a related role. We care more about the complexity you've owned and the influence you've had than an exact number of years.
• A record of owning consequential work end to end: framing an ambiguous question, structuring the analysis, forming a point of view, and driving a recommendation 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.
• The 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: you can show how you've used AI to improve the speed or quality of modeling, research, or recurring workflows, and how you check the reliability of its output.
• Curiosity to learn technical systems quickly and translate how AI products and modern infrastructure scale into financial insight.

About TRM Labs

TRM Labs provides AI-powered intelligence solutions that help public and private sector agencies investigate and disrupt crime. A Series C company with $220M in total funding backed by Goldman Sachs, Bessemer, Y Combinator, Thoma Bravo, and others, TRM is headquartered in San Francisco and operates as a distributed-first company with hubs in Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., London, and Singapore.