Head of Strategic Finance, Product & Engineering
Plaid offers a platform that enables applications to connect with users' bank accounts, facilitating a wide range of financial services. They provide tools for payments, personal finance management, credit, and more, serving clients like Moneybox, Western Union, and Affirm. Their core product is an API that provides access to a vast network of financial institutions, allowing developers to build financial products and services.
Funding
Projects
About Plaid
Plaid is a financial technology company that enables applications to connect with users' bank accounts. It allows consumers and businesses to interact with their bank accounts, check balances, and make payments through other financial technology applications. Plaid's network connects to over 12,000 financial institutions across 20 markets, serving a global user base of over 100 million. The company provides APIs for developers to build solutions for personal financial management, credit, payments, business finances, iGaming, and property management. Key products include Auth for account verification, Link for connecting accounts, Transactions for accessing financial data, Balance for real-time checks, Assets for verifying assets, and Identity for user verification. Plaid focuses on increasing conversion, fighting fraud, and providing clean, organized financial data for smarter underwriting and other financial services.
Skills
About the Role
You'll act as the primary finance partner to Plaid's CPO and CTO, reporting directly to the CFO, and serve as the strategic thought partner guiding resource allocation and execution across the Engineering, Product, and Design organization. You'll build product-level revenue and gross margin forecasts, both near-term and long-range, to help size Plaid's commercial opportunity years into the future. You'll partner on capital deployment decisions including headcount planning, capacity modeling, and AI tooling strategy, while identifying ways to optimize costs without sacrificing velocity. You'll own EPD performance tracking and reporting, ensuring the organization focuses on the highest-signal metrics, and you'll build trusted cross-functional relationships that connect EPD with the rest of the business, especially Product and GTM. You'll own the Product narrative for quarterly Board meetings, synthesizing business performance and strategic progress into executive-ready materials. You'll also define and build out the future of the EPD Finance team, hiring and developing a high-performing group capable of operating at the pace of a scaled growth-stage business.
Requirements
- 15+ years in Finance, with a background spanning management consulting, investment banking, private equity, or strategic finance at a high-growth technology company
- Deep fluency in product P&L finance including revenue forecasting, gross margin analysis, headcount and capacity planning, and software economics
- Exceptional analytical rigor paired with sharp business judgment
- A genuine builder with a player-coach approach to defining team and systems
- Demonstrated success leading and developing high-performing finance teams
- Executive presence and exceptional written, verbal, and visual communication skills
- Prior experience partnering with engineering and product leaders is a strong plus
- Fintech or financial services experience is a plus, but not required
Responsibilities
- Build product-level forecasts that accurately predict Plaid's topline performance in the near and mid-term
- Construct long-term forecasts balancing bottoms-up and top-down methodologies to size Plaid's commercial opportunity 3-5 years out
- Partner with the CPO and CTO on capital deployment including headcount planning and capacity modeling
- Shape the EPD AI tooling approach and conduct scenario planning
- Identify opportunities to optimize COGS and opex while increasing velocity
- Own EPD performance tracking and reporting, focusing on the highest-signal metrics
- Partner with Data teams on data hygiene, timeliness, and granularity
- Build trusted cross-functional relationships between EPD and the rest of the business
- Provide counsel and analytical support on cross-functional priorities between Product and GTM
- Own the Product narrative for quarterly Board meetings
- Define the future-state of the EPD Finance team and execute against it
- Hire, develop, and lead a high-performing finance team
- Collaborate with peer Finance leads and set the example for cross-team partnership
Benefits
- Medical insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- 401(k)
- Equity