Finance Operations Lead (Finance Ops Lead)

📋 Description

• • Rox Data Corp is seeking a highly motivated and detail-oriented Finance Operations Lead to join our lean, high-ownership Finance team. This is a foundational role designed to build and manage the core financial operational engine that supports our rapid growth as an AI-native revenue operating system provider. Backed by top-tier investors like Sequoia, GV, and General Catalyst, Rox is at the forefront of integrating data, AI, and revenue execution, empowering ambitious companies to move beyond fragmented CRM workflows.
• • As the Finance Operations Lead, you will be instrumental in establishing and scaling the financial discipline and operational rhythm necessary for a fast-moving Series A company. Your primary focus will be on ensuring the smooth, compliant, and efficient flow of day-to-day financial operations, enabling our teams to move quickly while maintaining rigorous controls. This role is deeply hands-on, requiring you to manage critical workflows that precede our accounting processes, ensuring accuracy and audit readiness.
• • You will own the end-to-end spend operations, acting as the central point of contact for vendor management, purchasing approvals, corporate card administration, and employee reimbursements. This includes managing the entire vendor onboarding lifecycle, from collecting necessary documentation (W-9, W-8 forms) and verifying bank details to implementing change controls and setting up vendors in our system. Your diligence here will ensure we maintain strong vendor relationships and compliance.
• • A significant part of your role will involve managing the invoice intake and bill payment workflow. This entails routing invoices for approval, diligently following up with approvers, ensuring all required documentation is attached, and resolving any exceptions that arise. You will be the gatekeeper, ensuring that our payment processes are efficient, accurate, and adhere to company policies.
• • The administration of our corporate card and expense program will also fall under your purview. This includes enforcing policy guidelines, ensuring receipt compliance, and acting as the primary point of contact for resolving any issues or questions employees may have regarding their corporate cards or expense submissions. Similarly, you will manage the employee reimbursement process, overseeing approvals, handling exceptions, and providing clear, timely support to employees.
• • Beyond day-to-day execution, you will leverage your analytical and lightweight modeling skills to identify opportunities for optimization and cost savings. This involves supporting vendor and contract decisions by building models to evaluate tradeoffs, such as tiering options, seat growth projections, prepay vs. monthly payment structures, and the impact of volume discounts. You will also maintain a critical tracker for vendor renewal commitments, quantifying upcoming cash flow and budget impacts to provide proactive financial visibility.
• • A key aspect of this role is driving operational analytics and lightweight modeling to enhance decision-making and reduce friction. You will build and utilize models to assess vendor contract nuances and support strategic spend decisions. Furthermore, you will analyze spend and workflow data to pinpoint areas of spend leakage and operational bottlenecks, quantifying their impact (e.g., cycle times, exception rates, policy compliance) and actively driving the implementation of corrective actions.
• • You will partner closely with the Head of Finance on ad-hoc analyses, transforming raw, often messy data into clear assumptions and actionable recommendations. While this role is ops-first and not responsible for full forecasting ownership, your analytical contributions will be vital for informed decision-making.
• • Building and continuously improving scalable workflows and controls is paramount. You will implement and refine spend controls, including approval matrices, spending thresholds, segregation of duties, and robust audit trails. Standardizing purchasing processes through intake forms, PO-like approvals, and clear documentation standards will be a core responsibility.
• • Maintaining clean master data for vendors, departments, and coding structures, in close partnership with the accounting team, is essential for data integrity. You will also build and monitor key Finance Operations metrics, such as cycle times, queue aging, and compliance rates, using this data to drive continuous improvement initiatives.
• • Identifying spend leakage and policy gaps through trend analysis (e.g., out-of-policy spend, duplicate vendors, missing receipts) and implementing preventative measures will be a critical function. You will also own the creation and maintenance of Finance Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), training materials, FAQs, and other documentation that defines our internal financial processes.
• • As the internal finance front door, you will triage daily inbound requests from employees and vendors via Slack, email, and ticketing systems. This requires effective coordination with People Ops, Sales, IT Security, and budget owners to unblock critical processes like onboarding and purchasing. Driving responsiveness and establishing clear Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for approvals, reimbursements, new vendor setup, and payments is key to employee and vendor satisfaction.
• • You will partner closely with the accounting team to ensure month-end close readiness. This involves ensuring that accounting receives complete and accurate packets, including proper coding, receipts, approvals, and contract links. You will support cutoff procedures, identify missing receipts or invoices, and provide inputs for accruals based on open bills and commitments. Proactively surfacing anomalies before close by analyzing spend trends and driving resolution will be crucial.
• • Success in this role means that within your first few days, you are fully ramped on our spend stack and workflows, establishing clear SLAs with accounting and stakeholders. Within a few weeks, core operational queues are running predictably with improved documentation and fewer exceptions, vendor onboarding and payments are faster and safer, and you are tracking key metrics and identifying bottlenecks. Within a few months, spend operations are a reliable system with minimal escalations, strong compliance, clean data packets for accounting, and proactive anomaly detection, supported by crisp, lightweight analyses for key vendor spend decisions.