Lightspeed Head of Finance
Posted Updated 4
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Location(s)
This is a hybrid role based out of our San Francisco, CA or New York, NY office. Our team works in-office time on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
About the Role
This is your chance to build our finance function and shape how it grows, working directly with leadership on the company’s biggest decisions. Right now there’s no one in finance. You’ll take over work that has been handled by leaders from other teams and an outsourced accounting partner, and build it for our next stage of growth. Your job goes beyond reporting the numbers: you’ll shape decisions on hiring, sales compensation, marketing spend and fundraising.
This is a builder role. Some of our processes are manual, a few tools are half-implemented, and some of the most important work hasn’t started yet. You’ll do the hands-on work and design the systems at the same time. If you like turning messy processes into scalable ones and want a real say in how the company grows, read on.
What You'll Do
FP&A, forecasting and modeling
- Own the company operating model, including burn, opex and headcount forecasting, budgeting and runway analysis
- Partner with our Head of RevOps, who owns the bookings and ARR forecast, to tie revenue into a single company model
- Run the monthly business review and own the financial sections of board materials
- Build the financial foundation, including models, metrics, reporting and diligence readiness, ahead of our next raise
Strategic finance and decision support
- Bring a finance lens to key business decisions, including the hiring plan, sales comp design, marketing budget and fundraising strategy
- Work with cross-functional leaders as a partner who helps them make better tradeoffs, not just as a scorekeeper
Invoicing and revenue operations
- Move billing and invoicing from manual work to automated, scalable processes
- Choose and implement financial tooling, starting with getting an in-flight billing system integration finished
- Make our contracted ARR match what’s actually billed and collected each month by removing invoicing delays, approval bottlenecks and unbilled accounts
Accounting and external relationships
- Be the main point of contact for our outsourced accounting partner, and tighten month-end close and revenue recognition
- Build the plan for bringing accounting in-house and decide when to do it
Commissions and partner fees
- Partner with RevOps and HR on commissions, serving as the finance check on calculations and owning the controls and accounting behind them
- Turn our CRM-level referral and partner fee reporting into a working payment process
Spend and margin
- Own gross margin by understanding what drives our cost to serve customers and finding ways to improve it
- Manage company-wide spend and vendor contracts, giving leadership visibility beyond any single team’s budget
What You’ve Done
- 7+ years in finance, with a strong background in FP&A or strategic finance
- Experience partnering with B2B SaaS sales teams: you’ve modeled sales capacity and comp plans, built bookings and pipeline forecasts, and worked through quota, commission and deal-desk questions
- Fluency in SaaS metrics such as ARR, NRR, CAC payback, gross margin and burn multiple, plus the judgment to know which ones matter at a given moment
- Working knowledge of ASC 606 and the month-end close, enough to hold an outsourced accounting team to a high bar
- Hands-on experience with a modern startup finance stack (e.g., QuickBooks, Ramp, Carta) and implementing billing tools
- Scrappiness: you’re comfortable building your own models, cleaning up data and fixing processes yourself. No task is beneath you, and you don’t need a team to get started.
- Clear communication with non-finance leaders and the ability to push back with data
- Startup experience, ideally at Series A to C. Fundraising or board reporting experience is a strong plus.