Finance Director

What you will work on

Most tech startups limit their innovation to their products. Balena does not. Behind the scenes we are innovating as we build out the operational side of the company, the machine that makes the machine. Our focus is on enabling team members to be the best they can be rather than controlling what everyone does from the top down, and this creates challenges that require just as much creative thinking as our product - especially on the finance side.

• Our mission is unlock the promise of physical computing by reducing friction for fleet owners, and this means that we develop and sell both software and hardware
• We operate legal entities and offices in three countries, but want balena to operate as a global whole where geography doesn’t matter
• We have been remote-first since 2013 and have 96 team members in 24 countries and 13 timezones - they need to be supplied, happy, aligned, fulfilled and paid, and they need to be able to work and communicate asynchronously
• We have no silos, no fixed teams, and no budgets, so we are building internal tooling that gives everyone the context they need to be able to operate independently and in alignment with balena’s goals
• The aim of everyone’s job is to automate what they’re doing day-to-day so that they can move onto the next challenge that interests them - repetitive manual tasks and routine toil are anathema to us
• When we solve a problem, we solve it definitively and then share the tools we build with the world - see our open source scheduling algorithm, although our most successful example remains balenaEtcher

Does any of this sound interesting to you? Work with us and we will offer you the opportunity to frame your role and take ownership of outcomes, both day-to-day and long-term. You will add value by finding and solving hard problems while constantly relearning your craft. We will enable and support your growth, but you should also be open and flexible to figure things out on your own.

Responsibilities

• Be balena’s subject matter expert for all things finance, lending your expertise and educating others across the business
• Ensure that everyone who makes decisions at balena has the financial information and analysis they need for these decisions to be good
• Own the financial reporting and tax compliance for an international group of companies (UK parent, Greek branch, US subsidiary)
• Provide in a timely manner the reporting required by our Board, major shareholders and lenders
• Maintain and improve our projections and financial models
• Manage relationships with our outsourced accounting providers
• Drive the automation of routine processes
• Solve problems in such a way that we can open source the solutions and other companies can start using them as well
• Make finance seem effortless

Requirements

• ACA/CPA or equivalent
• Real world post-qualification experience, ideally in a startup or scale-up environment
• Comfort with the requirements of an international SaaS startup with a sideline in hardware assembly (revenue recognition, inventory, working capital, consolidation, intercompany agreements, FX, SaaS metrics, debt, share options)
• You know what good looks like, but at the same time are prepared to challenge conventional approaches from first principles
• Fascination with company structure, and a strong desire to improve how companies operate
• Drive for execution — owning outcomes and pushing projects to completion
• Ability to manage ambiguity and independently make critical trade-off decisions
• Continuous improvement mindset, and desire to make yourself and others more effective
• Excellent communication skills and fluency in English

Bonus points

• Ability to code
• Background in data science
• Experience with other areas of a company’s operations, e.g. legal, HR, commercial, fundraising
• Experience with the accounting requirements and standard tools and approaches in any of the UK, US and Greece

Make sure to let us know if any of these items apply to you!

Benefits

• Competitive salary and stock options
• Generous vacation allowance (PTO)
• 12 weeks maternity and paternity leave for new parents
• Equipment of your choice and hardware for side projects
• Annual company gathering in an international location
• Working with a talented and globally distributed team
• Flexible schedules by default
• First month spent working on a project of your choice, with a mentor, to gain product knowledge and learn balena working practices and culture

Who we are

Balena is a highly distributed company that has embraced a remote-first approach since 2013. We are a group of individuals from across the globe working together to achieve our mission: “reduce friction for fleet owners and unlock the power of physical computing”. For us, this means removing the barriers to entry for developing IoT products, whether that’s easing software deployments with balenaCloud, simplifying image flashing with balenaEtcher, or offering our own hardware based on our experience seeing thousands of devices running in production environments. We're engineering a complete, end-to-end solution that makes it easy for any developer to manage their Fleets at the Edge.

How we work

• We place trust and autonomy in our team to own the outcome of their work.
• We practice radical candor and transparency with open, honest, and clear communications.
• We embrace first-principles thinking and constantly challenge our assumptions.
• We organize ourselves based on the best use of our collective abilities to solve our highest priority problems at any given time, rather than by a strict hierarchy.
• We’re not afraid to fail as long as we learn from our mistakes.
• We’re always looking for common patterns that allow us to reduce complexity.
• We embrace short-term pain for long-term gain, building products that will stand the test of time.