Strategic Finance Senior Associate

About the role

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world. The Strategic Finance team provides data-driven insights to inform strategic, financial, and operational decision-making across the company. As a Strategic Finance Senior Associate, you’ll support the Research & Development (R&D) organization—the teams that design, build, and scale the technology behind Toast’s all-in-one restaurant platform—and help drive R&D FP&A across the function. In this high-impact role, you’ll work closely with business leaders and cross-functional stakeholders to deliver analytical insights, support business planning, and inform 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 in a fast-paced environment.
• 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
• Ability to think creatively and critically, and thrive in a dynamic and often ambiguous work environment

Skills

• Experience supporting an R&D, Engineering, Product, or other technology function (nice to have)
• Public company Strategic Finance background (nice to have)
• SaaS industry experience (nice to have)
• Working knowledge of Adaptive, NetSuite, and Zip (nice to have)
• Working knowledge of SQL or experience with BI tools (nice to have)

Benefits

Toast strives to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in the industry. The total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with flexibility to meet changing needs. Learn more about our benefits.

Pay

The base salary range for this role is $102,000—$163,000 USD. The starting salary will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, total rewards include cash compensation (overtime, bonus/commissions if eligible), equity, and benefits.

Toast aligns pay with local labor markets through its Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy.

Schedule

Toast embraces a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs. In-office expectations vary by region. Learn more about locations and expectations.