R&D Finance Lead
Bay Area, CAFull-time$200–300K/yrPosted todayStill listed today
Most applications go out cold — see where you stand first. No sign-up to start.
You apply on the employer's site, with no Olive account needed.
Watch jobs like this. New roles like this one near Bay Area, CA, by email.
Don't just apply. Show up ready.
Olive works from this exact posting.
At a glance
Olive lists jobs from US employers, including remote roles you can work from the United States.
Job overview
The R&D Finance Lead will own finance for Parallel’s research and engineering organization, modeling and forecasting compute, infrastructure, and other R&D costs. The role partners with engineering, research, procurement, and accounting leaders on budgets, headcount, vendor negotiations, and cost treatment. It translates unit economics and infrastructure efficiency into recommendations for the founding team. Parallel works fully in person between its Palo Alto headquarters and San Francisco office.
Skills & qualifications
Skills
Qualifications
Benefits
Full job description
About us Parallel is a web infrastructure company. Our products are used by leading businesses in sales, marketing, insurance, and coding to build best-in-class AI agents with flexible and powerful programmatic access to the web.
We've raised $230 million from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, First Round, and Terrain to build the web for AIs. We're currently valued at $2 billion and we're forming a world-class team of engineers, designers, marketers, sellers, researchers, and operational experts to achieve our mission.
Job: You will own finance for Parallel’s research and engineering organization, where most of our spend goes. You’ll build the model for compute, our largest and fastest-moving cost, tracking training, inference, and infrastructure spend against commitments and usage, and you’ll forecast where it’s headed as the product scales. You’ll partner directly with engineering and research leadership on headcount plans, budgets, and the tradeoffs between building, buying, and spending more compute. You’ll work with procurement on compute and vendor negotiations, and with accounting on how R&D costs get treated and capitalized. You’ll turn cost per query, gross margin, and infrastructure efficiency into clear recommendations, and you’ll make sure the founding team knows what every major technical bet costs before they make it. You: You’ve owned finance for an engineering or infrastructure organization at a high-growth tech company, ideally one where compute or cloud was a top cost line. You understand reserved versus on-demand pricing, GPU commitments, and how utilization drives unit economics. You can sit with engineers, understand what they’re building, and turn it into a cost model they trust. You came up through a high-rigor environment and since then have worked where the data is messy and the process doesn’t exist yet. You’ve told a technical leader their plan was too expensive and helped them find a cheaper way to get there. You use AI tools to do real work, and you’d rather build the function than inherit it.
Life at Parallel Our team works fully in-person, between our Palo Alto HQ and San Francisco office. We’re a flat, talent-dense organization dedicated to solving technical and creative problems.
We seek like-minded individuals who share our passion for applying science, creativity, and consistency to big and complex problems with equally big outcomes. These are our values:
-
Own customer impact: It’s on us to ensure real-world outcomes for our customers.
-
Obsess over craft: Perfect every detail because quality compounds.
-
Accelerate change: Ship fast, adapt faster, and move frontier ideas into production.
-
Create win-wins: Creatively turn trade-offs into upside.
-
Make high-conviction bets: Try and fail. But succeed an unfair amount.
Compensation & benefits
-
Competitive salary
-
Generous equity
-
Visa sponsorships
-
401K plans
-
Daily lunch & office snacks
-
Dinner at the office
-
Unlimited vacation
-
Caltrain pass reimbursement
How this job compares
Set against the 5,766 open Finance jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 4, 2026.
- Pay
- This posting$200–300K/yr
- California median$140–208K/yr656 salary ranges
- US median$111–187K/yr3,799 salary ranges
This range's midpoint, $250K, is 43% above the California median midpoint ($175K) — in the top quarter of Finance salary ranges in California.
- Openings
- Olive Jobs lists 855 open Finance jobs in California and 5,766 across the US. 4% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
- Experience
- Finance postings that state a minimum ask for 5 years of experience at the median; the middle half ask for 3 to 8 years (4,595 postings).
- Education
- 3,370 of the 5,766 open Finance jobs (58%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.
Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 4, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.
Prepare for this role
You've read the whole posting — now see how you match it.
