Head of Strategic Finance

About Clair

If you can send your friends money in seconds, why does it still take your employer two weeks to send your paycheck?

At Clair, we are on a mission to create financial freedom for America's workers by giving them a digital banking platform that allows them to get paid as soon as they clock out of work. But we're not just another digital bank or on-demand pay provider. We meet Americans at their place of work by embedding our products within the scheduling, workforce management, and payroll apps they already use every day.

Learn more about us at getclair.com/about

The Job

You own the operating model. The whole thing. Revenue, expenses, headcount, unit economics. When the CEO asks "What happens to margin if we launch this product at this price," your model answers that question in hours, not days. When the board asks why we missed forecast, you already know and have a view on what to do about it.

You report to the VP of Finance. He’s not handing you the model and walking away. He stays close to the numbers, stress-tests assumptions, and works in the model alongside you when the stakes are high. He leads the strategic finance agenda (fundraising, pricing strategy, capital allocation, company operating cadence, investor relations) and you build the analytical foundation underneath those decisions. The difference is altitude: you own the model day-to-day, he pressure-tests it and uses it to drive the biggest calls.

Clair provides on-demand pay to hourly workers through embedded partnerships with large payroll and time platforms like Gusto, Intuit QuickBooks, BambooHR, Connecteam, and 7shifts. The business has real complexity: multi-partner unit economics, cohort-based lending dynamics, credit risk, and a product surface that’s expanding. If you want a job where the model is a static spreadsheet you update once a quarter, this isn’t it.

What You Actually Do

Own the Numbers

• Build, maintain, and defend Clair’s consolidated operating model

• Run the annual budget process end-to-end. Bottoms-up plans with every department, reconciled to top-down targets

• Maintain weekly rolling forecasts. You’re the first person to know when something is off and you turn that into action, not just insight

• Variance analysis that says something. Not "Revenue was $50K below plan" but "Revenue was $50K below plan because partner X’s conversion dropped 15% after their app update, and here’s what we should do"

• Own the reporting cadence: monthly reviews, QBRs, board materials

Support Strategy

• Build the models behind fundraising: investor decks, data rooms, due diligence answers

• Model new product economics before we build anything. What are the unit economics? What’s the break-even?

• Pricing and take-rate analysis for new and existing partnerships

• Be the VP of Finance’s go-to analytical partner on big-picture questions

Connect the Dots

• Product team says engagement is up. Partnerships says a new population is onboarding. Data science says default rates are shifting. You’re the one who turns those inputs into a coherent financial picture

• Translate model outputs into plain English for people who don’t live in spreadsheets

• Make sure the model matches reality. Partner with accounting on close. If actuals and forecast diverge, figure out why

Build the Team and the Machine

• Build processes that scale. Automate the stuff that should be automated. Know when a human needs to look at the number. Evolve our processes and tools to be AI-native and generating maximum operating leverage

• Own the tooling: Pigment, dashboards, reporting infrastructure

What You’ll Bring to the Table

• 5-8+ years. Ideally a combination of IB, PE, or consulting foundation. At least 2+ years owning FP&A or strategic finance at a growth-stage startup (Series B through D)

• You’ve built or rebuilt a company operating model, not just inherited a clean one and updated it

• Experience supporting a fundraise. Data rooms, investor models, fielding questions

• You can model across business types: transaction-based, SaaS, lending/credit

• Excel/Sheets, SQL, Pigment, or Anaplan. Pigment preferred

• You can write a board memo on our growth trajectory and walk a Data Analyst through our margin profile in the same afternoon.

• You’ve managed or mentored at least one person

• Bachelor’s in Finance, Economics, Accounting, or STEM

What’s Margin Accretive

• Fintech experience, especially earned wage access, lending, or payments

• You’ve modeled credit risk, default curves, or loan-level economics

• You’ve built financial infrastructure at a company that was scaling faster than it was organizing

• You’re at home navigating and constructing relational databases.

• You can build your own dashboards (Tableau, Pigment, Sheets)

Why You Should Take This Job

• You want a seat at the table building and scaling a high-growth, venture scale startup and you understand what that entails

• You want to own FP&A. It’s yours to build, not just steward

• The business model is genuinely interesting. Multi-partner, complex underwriting, unique distribution

• You’re curious. You see a line move on a chart and you don’t stop digging until you know exactly why.

• You have a strong bias toward action. You don’t just find the answer. You do something about it

• You can naturally maintain a mental model of the business that’s high-fidelity. If someone asks "What happens if we do this?" you have an informed take in the room, not a week later after a bunch of modeling

• You care about our mission to make Americans feel financially free, and you’re willing to dig deep to make it happen

Why You Shouldn’t Take This Job

• You need a 9-5. Hours will be intense. We maintain balance, but we expect a lot from every member of the team

• Your weekends are sacred. Some weekend work isn’t uncommon in this seat

• You like having a playbook. We’re on new ground here; you’ll need to borrow from many domains, not all of which are in the typical finance universe.

• You don’t want to build/rebuild. Nothing we’ve built is dogma. You’ll be expected to create for yourself and your business partners

Additional Details

Location: This is a hybrid position based out of New York City, you will be expected to come into the office at least three days a week (Tuesdays, Wednesdays, & Thursdays) with additional days on occasion for client meetings.

Compensation: The annual base salary for this role is $188,600 - $215,200. The base pay for this role is determined using many factors, such as education, skills and experience and is reflective of Clair Series stage and size. Base pay is only one part of Clair’s competitive total compensation package which includes equity, benefits and additional perks. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future.

Clair will only contact candidates from @getclair.com email addresses. We will never ask for payments or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you happen to receive anything suspicious, please ignore it.

Need more convincing?

Apart from getting to work with our incredible team, here are some of the benefits you can expect when you join Clair:

• Medical, Dental, & Vision Coverage, with option to extend to your family

• Fully-paid parental leave

• Company-sponsored 401k, HSA, and FSA

• Unlimited vacation for salaried roles, generous PTO for hourly roles

• Work from home setup allowance

• Access to your earnings every day on Clair

• Company-sponsored short-term and long-term disability insurance

Equal Opportunity Employer Information

Clair is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity at our company. We actively seek a diverse applicant pool and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

For questions, please email us at careers@getclair.com

Compensation Range: $188.6K - $215.2K