Strategic Finance Lead
TolanSummary
Tolan is seeking a Strategic Finance Lead to build its financial infrastructure from the ground up. This is the company's first dedicated finance hire, reporting directly to the CEO. The role involves developing financial models, defining key performance indicators, and providing strategic financial partnership to various teams. The ideal candidate will have strong financial judgment, experience in tech companies, and an interest in AI, with approximately 5 years of experience. Bonus points for SQL/Python skills and experience building finance functions from scratch.
Required Skills
Details
- Experience Required
- 5+ years
- Posted
- Jun 25, 2026
Description
Tolan is building truly personal AI that helps people think, reflect, and take action in their real lives.
Over the last year, we've grown to more than 130,000 paying users, with industry-leading metrics across engagement, retention, and customer NPS. We've raised from some of the world's leading AI investors, including Khosla Ventures, Lachy Groom, Homebrew, Mike Krieger, and others. We're hiring a Strategic Finance Lead to help us decide where we go next and how we get there.
The role
This is Tolan’s first dedicated finance hire. You’ll build the financial backbone of the company from scratch and work directly with the CEO on the decisions that determine how we grow.
You'll help determine where we invest, how aggressively we grow, and how we build a durable consumer AI business. You'll drive the finance work end to end, from forecasting and planning through board and investor reporting, and you'll use AI to drive more impact than a much larger team.
What you'll do
Own the numbers
- Build and own Tolan's core financial and operating models: revenue, unit economics, burn, runway, and scenarios.
- Keep a high bar for accuracy so the founders can rely on the numbers.
- Define the KPIs that matter for a consumer AI product and build the dashboards to track them.
Drive the decisions
- Work directly with the founders to set goals, weigh tradeoffs, and decide where to put time and money.
- Act as a strategic partner to product, growth, research and operations leaders, helping them make better decisions.
- Translate data into clear recommendations and surface insights proactively.
Build the function
- Stand up the finance processes, systems, and reporting a company our size needs, from scratch.
- Support long-term fundraising and other strategic moments with diligence-ready analysis.
- Build the finance function around AI from the start..
Who you are
You've built real financial judgment somewhere it counted. For a lot of people that looks like a few years in investment banking or a similar field out of college, learning to build hyper-accurate models, then an in-house role at a scaling tech company, with real ownership and enough complexity to make the work matter. All told, this could be ~5 years of experience. That's one route in, but not the only one.
You take an ambiguous question, find the answer, and drive it to a decision with little oversight. You can make a complex analysis clear to people who don't work in spreadsheets. You have a strong academic background.
You're AI-curious or AI-native. You already reach for AI to work faster, and you want to help define what a finance function looks like when it's built around these tools from the start.
Bonus points if you've worked at a consumer or AI company, if you're comfortable in SQL or Python, or if you've built a finance function from zero.
Compensation and logistics
- Location: Onsite in SF
- Compensation: competitive salary and meaningful equity, set to experience.
- Reports to: CEO.
