## About the Role

Zapier is hiring a Finance Manager, also referred to as a Finance Business Partner / FinOps leader, to support the R&D organization within Strategic Finance. The role partners closely with Product, Engineering, and Infrastructure leaders to strengthen financial accountability, improve investment visibility, and support better decisions across the R&D portfolio.

Strategic Finance focuses on high-impact decisions, investment evaluation, and efficient capital allocation to support sustainable growth. In addition to R&D finance work, this position contributes to board materials, competitive intelligence, and strategic planning. The role is fully remote for candidates in the Americas, with an expectation of working in North America time zones (Pacific Time to Eastern Time).

## Key Responsibilities

– Lead forecasting, budgeting, and variance analysis for R&D spend, including headcount, AWS infrastructure, tooling, and AI-related costs.
– Build decision-ready financial models for scenario planning, capacity planning, and long-term investment decisions tied to product growth and technical architecture.
– Translate engineering, product, and infrastructure inputs into clear financial implications and trade-offs.
– Partner with technical teams to improve cost visibility and efficiency across cloud and infrastructure spend.
– Evaluate and track AI-related spend, including internal and vendor-based costs, and assess ROI and trade-offs.
– Provide strategic insights to R&D leadership by identifying trends, risks, and optimization opportunities.
– Prepare clear materials for executive and board-level reporting.
– Improve forecasting accuracy, automate reporting where possible, and strengthen the quality of data flowing into FP&A systems.
– Support broader corporate finance work, including competitive intelligence and strategic planning.

## Required Skills

– 4–6+ years of accounting or finance-specific experience.
– 2+ years of experience working with R&D organizations.
– Prior experience partnering with R&D or product teams and translating technical roadmaps into financial frameworks.
– Strong financial modeling skills, including both bottoms-up and high-level models.
– Ability to turn technical inputs into financial implications and trade-offs.
– End-to-end ownership of work, with comfort in ambiguity and follow-through from scoping to execution.
– Resourceful, adaptable, and willing to challenge assumptions to solve problems.
– Strong analytical instincts, curiosity for data, and attention to trends.
– Detail-oriented, highly organized, and able to prioritize effectively in a fast-paced environment.
– Comfortable driving cross-functional alignment and delivering high-quality work with minimal oversight.
– Active use of AI in day-to-day work, with the ability to describe workflows built and the impact on quality, efficiency, and decision support.

## Preferred Skills

– Background in Big 4 Accounting, Investment Banking, or Management Consulting with ownership of operating expense areas, ideally R&D or technical cost structures.
– SQL experience.

## Cloud Platforms & Technologies

### Cloud Providers
– AWS
– Cloud infrastructure

### Programming / Query Languages
– SQL

### Finance and Planning Systems
– FP&A systems

### Artificial Intelligence
– AI-related workflows
– AI-related spend across internal and vendor tools

## FinOps Responsibilities

– Lead forecasting, budgeting, and variance analysis for cloud and infrastructure spend.
– Model cloud economics, including usage drivers, unit economics, and scaling behavior.
– Partner with technical teams to improve cloud cost visibility and efficiency.
– Evaluate AI-related investments and assess ROI and trade-offs.
– Support decision-making as AI usage scales across product and internal operations.
– Improve reporting automation and data quality for cloud and AI cost data.
– Build scalable models for scenario planning and long-term investment decisions.

## Why You Might Be Interested

This role offers ownership of R&D financial planning in a fully remote environment and sits at the intersection of finance, engineering, product, infrastructure, cloud economics, and AI spend. It includes both day-to-day forecasting and longer-term scenario planning, along with executive and board-level reporting. The work also extends into broader corporate finance areas such as competitive intelligence and strategic planning. If you want a role with cross-functional scope and direct impact on investment decisions, this is a compelling opportunity.