AI Controllership Expert

Our client is an early-stage AI financial software company run by senior executives from the Big 4, Google, AMD, SAP, Accenture and Microsoft. World class C-Suite and unrivaled funding. We are looking for a high-potential controllership professional with experience in a public company or other complex operating environment. You will contribute your professional expertise in building advanced AI capabilities for the office of the CFO, with an initial focus on month-end close, reporting, reconciliations, SOX/ICFR, and audit-ready evidence.

This role is designed for an operator who understands how finance work happens in practice and wants to support the product team changing it. Working alongside senior domain leaders, customers, product, and engineering, you will translate real close and reporting experience into scalable workflows. The right person is technically credible, commercially curious, highly proactive, and willing to move between strategic product questions and the detailed work required to make a solution usable.

Proactivity is a core job requirement. We need someone who notices what is missing, proposes a practical path forward, and follows assigned work through to a decision or usable output while keeping the appropriate leaders informed.

Responsibilities

• Translate month-end close, account reconciliation, external-reporting, and ICFR processes into clear product requirements, workflow logic, evidence standards, exception routes, and reviewer approvals.
• Map how work actually moves across policies, systems, data, preparers, reviewers, controls, judgments, and auditors - including the workarounds and failure points that formal process maps often miss.
• Partner with product and engineering to design practical capabilities for close readiness, reconciliations, accounting analysis, reporting, and control evidence.
• Support discovery and design sessions with CFO, CAO, Controller, financial-reporting, accounting-operations, SOX, internal-audit, and finance-transformation stakeholders through preparation, facilitation support, synthesis, and follow-through.
• Build realistic examples and test cases; validate outputs for accounting accuracy, completeness, explainability, consistency, and operational usefulness.
• Support workstreams from initial problem framing through requirements, prototype feedback, user acceptance testing, implementation, and continuous improvement; proactively surface risks, recommendations, and next steps.
• Help customers convert company policies, historical conclusions, review practices, and audit expectations into reusable knowledge and governed workflows.
• Develop implementation playbooks, user guidance, customer-facing materials, and product knowledge that can be reused across industries and engagements.
• Identify how close and controllership intelligence can support adjacent decisions involving revenue, margin, working capital, forecasting, reporting, and growth.
• Support demonstrations, proposals, thought leadership, and knowledge-sharing across this startup’s broader Finance team and roadmap.

Requirements

• 5-10 years of experience in controllership, accounting operations, external reporting, technical accounting, or a closely related finance role.
• Meaningful in-house experience within a public company or large, complex private operating company; earlier Big Four or advisory experience is ideal
• Hands-on experience with month-, quarter-, and year-end close, including reconciliations, balance-sheet substantiation, review, issue resolution, and reporting deadlines.
• Significant knowledge of U.S. GAAP and experience applying accounting policy to actual transactions and close judgments.
• CPA certification.
• Experience in technology, industrials, energy, telecommunications, automotive, utilities, healthcare, consumer products, or another capital-intensive or operationally complex industry.
• Experience with multinational or multi-entity close, consolidation, intercompany, foreign currency, statutory reporting, or complex ERP environments.
• Experience with SAP, Oracle, Workday, BlackLine, OneStream, Hyperion, NetSuite or comparable finance and close platform