Strategic Finance Lead, Compute Economics (Gross Margin COGS)

📋 Description

• • Rox Data Corp is seeking a highly strategic and execution-focused individual to join our Finance team as the Strategic Finance Lead, Compute Economics. This pivotal role sits at the critical intersection of Finance and Engineering, focusing on managing and optimizing our gross margin and Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) as we scale our AI-driven workloads. You will be instrumental in building the financial systems and operational cadences that make our performance measurable, our tradeoffs explicit, and our scaling decisions repeatable. As a fast-moving Series A company backed by prominent investors like Sequoia, GV, and General Catalyst, we are building the AI-native revenue operating system for modern go-to-market teams, replacing fragmented workflows with intelligent, autonomous systems. Our Finance team operates as a true partner to Engineering, Product, and Go-To-Market, and this role is foundational to our ability to manage and improve profitability.
• • In this role, you will treat event-level usage data and vendor billing with the same rigor an investor applies to unit economics. Your primary responsibility will be to build conviction in our numbers, identify the true cost drivers, and translate these insights into actionable decisions and measurable outcomes. You will be the single point of accountability for ensuring "margin truth" across our entire AI compute stack, encompassing models from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini, as well as our cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP) and data warehouses (Snowflake, Databricks).
• • This position demands a unique blend of deep analytical capability and hands-on operational execution. You will be responsible for developing our comprehensive cost model, establishing trusted financial metrics, and translating complex analytical findings into concrete optimization initiatives that leadership will act upon. If you thrive on transforming intricate AI and cloud cost structures into clear, actionable decision frameworks and desire genuine ownership of a critical financial function, this role is meticulously designed for you.
• • **Key Responsibilities and Impact:**
• • **Compute Economics and AI Cloud Vendor Strategy:** Develop, maintain, and continuously refine an executive-level AI compute cost model. This includes detailed analysis of unit costs, sensitivity analysis, and scenario planning. You will also lead the finance workstream for all major cloud vendor negotiations, including managing cloud commitments, discount tiers, credits, true-ups, and assessing the financial risks associated with various commitment postures.
• • **Own the COGS Operating Cadence:** Establish and manage a rigorous operating cadence for COGS, encompassing weekly and monthly driver analysis, anomaly detection, forecast vs. actual variance explanations, and detailed gross margin reporting by customer, feature, and workflow. This ensures continuous visibility and control over our cost base.
• • **Define and Maintain Rate Cards and Cost Mapping:** Create and maintain accurate rate cards and cost attribution methodologies for all AI and cloud spend. This involves understanding and mapping model pricing, search provider billing, credits, discounts, and attributing infrastructure costs effectively.
• • **Partner with Engineering on Cost Attribution:** Collaborate closely with the Engineering team to define and implement the necessary tagging metadata for granular cost attribution. This includes ensuring event-level data captures critical dimensions such as customer ID, action workflow, model used, token type, endpoint tier, and environment. You will also validate metering coverage as instrumentation evolves to ensure alignment with vendor billing.
• • **Invoice Reconciliation and Variance Analysis:** Perform detailed reconciliation of vendor invoices against internal metering data. You will be responsible for explaining variances, identifying root causes related to credits, discounts, tiering, retries, timing cutoffs, and shared cost allocations.
• • **Build and Operate Cost Guardrails:** Work with Engineering to design, implement, and operate financial guardrails. This includes setting budgets and quotas, establishing cost caps, defining approval thresholds for spend, implementing default model policies, gating access to premium endpoints, and controlling spend between production and development environments.
• • **Produce Decision Memos and Drive Alignment:** Develop concise, decision-ready memos that quantify financial tradeoffs for proposed optimization initiatives (e.g., changes in routing mix, premium endpoint gating, caching strategies). These memos will clearly articulate expected savings, potential impacts on quality and latency, and drive alignment among stakeholders for action.
• • **Drive a Savings Pipeline with Engineering:** Proactively identify, size, and prioritize optimization opportunities. You will create and manage an optimization backlog, validate savings post-implementation, and report on realized outcomes, demonstrating tangible gross margin improvements.
• • **Collaboration Framework:**
• • **Finance Leadership:** You will partner with Finance leadership to set ambitious margin targets and North Star metrics. You will also be responsible for escalating critical decisions requiring executive attention, such as vendor strategy, contract posture, and major policy changes.
• • **Engineering:** You will co-design attribution requirements and guardrails with Engineering, validate that internal metering accurately reflects vendor billing, and translate financial insights into an executable savings backlog.
• • **Data Team:** You will align on metric definitions and ensure the data model supports close-ready reporting. While you will not own the data platform, you will be a key stakeholder in defining its requirements for cost analysis.
• • **Defining Success:** Success in this role is defined by achieving clear visibility and control over our COGS. In the initial phase, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of our COGS stack, instrumentation coverage, and current rate cards. Within weeks, you will be running a repeatable COGS cadence, establishing invoice parity, and defining cost attribution schema requirements. Within months, you will be trusted to provide explainable margin reporting by customer and feature, maintain tight invoice parity, and demonstrate a proven savings pipeline with verified realized improvements in gross margin.