Strategic Finance Lead, R&D

As Strategic Finance Lead for AI and R&D at TRM Labs, you'll be the dedicated finance partner to the CTO and R&D leadership, helping shape how the company invests in AI, cloud, compute infrastructure, and engineering capacity. You'll report to the Head of Strategic Finance and FP&A, turning complex usage, billing, and headcount data into recommendations that drive major investment decisions before they're made.

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
• Give R&D leaders an early view of change by owning planning, forecasting, and the headcount capacity model, with automated workflows that flag risks while there is still time to act
• Influence major infrastructure and R&D commitments by leading investment cases from business case to decision to measurement, with AI-assisted scenario analysis that makes tradeoffs clear
• 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, with demonstrated complexity owned and influence exerted
• A 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: 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

What we offer

• Substantial ownership from day one, with direct exposure to the CTO and executive team
• The role is built to scale with you: 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
• Work with a small, high-leverage Strategic Finance team that works directly with TRM's leadership on planning, investment decisions, and company-wide strategy
• Distributed-first working style with written communication for clarity and context, and live time for decisions and collaboration

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 operates as a distributed-first company with hubs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., London, and Singapore.