Strategic Finance Lead Jobs in San Francisco, CA

The Role

You'll be finance hire #1 at Comfy.

Comfy is growing fast: 4 million users, a fast-scaling cloud business, and a fresh $30M raise. So far we've run finance out of spreadsheets, outsourced bookkeeping, and founder intuition. That's no longer enough.

As our Lead, Strategic Finance, you'll be the first finance hire and the person who builds the analytical backbone of the company. You'll own the financial model, the planning process, and the unit economics of a compute-heavy AI business — and you'll roll up your sleeves on the operational finance basics too.

This is a hands-on, builder's role. You won't inherit a model or a playbook — you'll build them from a blank page. You'll live in the data, turn it into decisions the founders actually use, and bring financial rigor to a team that has been moving on instinct. It's a rare chance to own finance end-to-end early, with a clear path to grow as the function (and your scope) scales beneath you.

What You'll Do

Build the financial model from scratch: Own the company's three-statement model, budget, and forecast. Make it the source of truth the founders rely on for every major decision.

Run FP&A end-to-end: Drive budgeting, forecasting, and the planning cadence. Track actuals vs. plan, explain variances, and translate the numbers into clear recommendations.

Crack the unit economics: Get deep on cost-to-serve, GPU/inference COGS, gross margin, and retention/expansion. Be the person who knows exactly how a usage-based AI business makes and loses money.

Live in the data: Pull your own numbers, build KPI dashboards, and turn messy data into clean insight. You won't wait for someone to hand you a report — you'll build it.

Model the big decisions: Build scenarios for pricing, hiring, compute spend, and new bets so the team can see the financial consequences before committing.

Support fundraising and the board: Help build investor and board materials, own key metrics, and assemble the analysis behind the company's story.

Partner with GTM and Product: Work on pricing, packaging, and monetization so growth and margin move together.

Keep the basics tight: Track cash and runway, and manage the relationship with outsourced accounting/payroll partners so the operational side stays accurate while you build the strategic side.

You Might Be a Good Fit If You

Have 6+ years in strategic finance, FP&A, investment banking, private equity, consulting, or a high-growth startup finance team — with real hands-on ownership, not just slide support.

Are an exceptional modeler who can build a clean three-statement model and a fast back-of-envelope answer with equal rigor.

Are data-fluent — comfortable getting your own answers (SQL or BI a strong plus) rather than waiting to be handed a dataset.

Understand usage-based / consumption business models and COGS-heavy economics (bonus: AI, infrastructure, or compute).

Are scrappy and self-directed — you've built things 0 1 and are happy owning both the strategy and the operational plumbing while the function is small.

Operate from first principles with high agency and low ego. You bias toward action, communicate proactively, and own outcomes end-to-end.

Are SF-based or willing to relocate to join our in-person rhythm near Alamo Square.

Bonus If You Have

Experience at an open-source, developer-tools, or creator-tools company.

Been part of a fundraise as the person behind the model and the metrics.

Stood up an FP&A or strategic finance function from scratch.

Used Comfy or have real familiarity with AI creative tools.

Compensation

Base salary: $150K–$300K

Equity: + meaningful equity

Plus benefits and relocation support for SF.

About Comfy

Comfy (https://www.comfy.org) is the AI creation engine for visual professionals who demand control over every model, every parameter, and every output. The most powerful workflow engine for visual AI.

Unlike tools that hide everything behind a prompt box, Comfy lets you connect models, processing steps, and outputs on a canvas where every decision is visible and every step is inspectable. It gives you the building blocks to create workflows nobody's imagined yet, and share them with everyone.

What started as an open-source project in 2023 now has 4 million users, 60,000+ community-built nodes, and 150,000+ daily downloads. It's used by artists, filmmakers, game studios, designers, researchers, and VFX houses, including teams at OpenAI, Netflix, Amazon Studios, Ubisoft, EA, and Tencent.

We're a small, intense team in San Francisco. Our team comes from Stability AI and Google, and many contributed to the ComfyUI ecosystem long before working here. Low ego, high ownership. We work hard and demand a lot of each other, but we have fun. Everyone here is building something meaningful that will end up being our life's work.

If this mission excites you and you view yourself as top-tier talent, your future latent self is waiting for you at Comfy.

Check out our Github (https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI) and blog (https://blog.comfy.org). We recently raised $30M at a $500M valuation. The round was led by Craft, with participation from Pace Capital, Chemistry, TruArrow, and others.

Compensation Range: $150K - $300K