Strategic Finance Senior Associate

About the role

The Strategic Finance Senior Associate supports the Research & Development (R&D) organization at Toast, providing data-driven insights to inform strategic, financial, and operational decision-making.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a day-to-day finance partner to leaders and teams across the R&D organization, supporting investment, headcount, and resourcing decisions.
• Build and maintain financial models across headcount, vendor and cloud spend, capitalized software, and program investment, and translate them into clear, actionable operational recommendations.
• Deliver monthly and quarterly quantitative and qualitative analysis of R&D financial results, including variances to plan, ensuring key issues, risks, and business drivers are understood and highlighted.
• Support the annual planning and long-range planning processes for R&D, incorporating an understanding of product and technology roadmaps, team structures, and scaling needs.
• Contribute to strategic initiatives through a combination of business partnering, analytical insight, and project management.
• Proactively identify trends and areas of opportunity, surfacing insights that influence cross-functional strategic and operational decisions.
• Collaborate across all levels of the organization by building strong cross-functional relationships and developing a deep understanding of Toast’s business model, including unit economics, product and market strategies, competitive context, and internal processes.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or related field
• 5+ years of experience in Strategic Finance, FP&A, investment banking, consulting, or a similar analytical role
• Comfortable working cross-functionally, communicating complex financial information to non-finance audiences
• Strong Excel and financial modeling skills
• Ability to distill complex analyses into structured outputs used by teams throughout the company to size opportunities and build business cases for pursuing new initiatives
• Effective communication and project management skills; highly organized, independent, and self-motivated, with ability to present to all levels of management
• Able to think creatively and critically, and thrive in a dynamic and often ambiguous work environment

What will help you stand out

• Experience supporting an R&D, Engineering, Product, or other technology function
• Public company Strategic Finance background
• SaaS industry experience
• AI at Toast