Strategic Finance Manager, R&D

As a Strategic Finance Manager for R&D at TRM Labs, you own the financial engine for the company's research and development investment. You will model R&D spend across cloud infrastructure, AI and compute costs, and engineering headcount, translating that into decisions that keep R&D scaling efficiently relative to revenue. This role sits at the center of one of TRM's fastest-growing and most consequential cost centers.

What you'll do

• Keep R&D spend scaling efficiently against revenue by owning the cloud infrastructure and AI/compute cost models, using BigQuery and AI-assisted analysis to turn raw billing data into variance readouts leadership can act on within days of month-end
• Give the CTO and engineering leaders a live view of headcount capacity by building scenario models in Pigment and TRM's Claude-powered scenario engine, so hiring ramps can be compared and decided in hours rather than reworked over days
• Reduce the time R&D finance reporting takes to produce by extending TRM's board-deck automation, which refreshes executive and board materials directly from governed named ranges, so you spend your time on analysis instead of assembly
• Partner with the Head of AI to optimize AI and infrastructure spend, surfacing the build-vs-buy and efficiency opportunities that protect margins as usage grows
• Own monthly, quarterly, and annual planning and reporting cycles end-to-end with limited guidance
• Act as the finance point of contact for everything R&D, partnering cross-functionally with the CTO, engineering and infrastructure leaders, Recruiting, and Accounting
• Run planning cadences (monthly reforecasts, quarterly reviews, annual planning) end-to-end, with status and decisions communicated in writing

What you bring

• 5 to 8 years across investment banking, investing, consulting, or finance at a high-growth technology company
• A track record of owning monthly, quarterly, and annual planning and reporting cycles end-to-end with limited guidance
• Hands-on fluency using AI tools in real finance work: you have used tools like Claude or ChatGPT to accelerate modeling and analysis, and can judge when to trust their output and when to override it
• Expert-level Excel and Google Sheets modeling, plus experience building scalable, AI-assisted or agentic engines such as Pigment that turn one-off analysis into repeatable reporting
• Experience supporting technical or product organizations such as Engineering, Product, Data Science, or Infrastructure, including partnering with them to bring structure and AI-driven analysis to fast-growing cloud and compute costs

About TRM Labs

TRM Labs provides AI-powered intelligence solutions that help public and private sector agencies investigate and disrupt crime. The company is a Series C business 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, San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C., London, and Singapore.