Cloud computing is the future of computing, and yet today, that future is restricted to a rental-only service provider model that excludes the on-premises economy. Oxide has built a vertically integrated, rack-level cloud computer, delivering the efficiencies, security, automation, and developer experience of the cloud in a form that businesses can own.
It’s a terrific time to join Oxide. We are shipping racks in volume and have plenty of capital with the recent close of our Series D round. You would be joining a team that has proven itself up to the challenge through the last year of hypergrowth. We aspire to be a public company, and we want to put the planning discipline in place now. Today the in-house finance team is small, backed by strong outside accounting firms, tax advisors, a Big Four auditor, and FP&A consultants.
Oxide is looking for an experienced FP&A professional with the entrepreneurial drive to build this function from the ground up. You will make sure the company’s decisions are grounded in the numbers, and present those numbers to our Board and investors in a way they trust.
As Director of Strategic Finance at Oxide, you will:
Own the corporate financial model. Revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, and cash flow are driven by bookings, the production schedule, component costs, material availability, and headcount. Fluctuating component costs and rapidly scaling manufacturing mean we re-forecast often, so the model has to be a living document that can handle the complexity of the business and still be simple enough to follow.
Build and run the planning cadence. Including the monthly budget-to-actuals, the quarterly (sometimes monthly) re-forecast, the annual operating plan, the hiring plan, and the long-range plan. You will work closely with our excellent Sales and Operations teams so the plan reflects their reality.
Bring public-company forecasting discipline to Oxide. That means weighing in on which KPIs we will report externally, setting the standard for forecast accuracy and documentation that quarterly guidance will demand, and working with accounting to get the monthly close into the forecast, the Board and lender materials, and what we communicate to potential investors.
Work with Operations to keep COGS current as inventory costs and lead times move. Factor in variables like supplier deposits, payment terms, manufacturing capacity, customer deployment timing, and receivables into the cash forecast.
Partner with the CFO on banking relationships and treasury management.
You will thrive in this role if you:
Have run FP&A, or been a core part of it, at a public company. You have run the quarterly forecast that underpinned external guidance and lived the earnings cycle from close through investor reporting and Q&A. Bonus points if you’ve built the planning process from scratch.
Understand how costs flow through a hardware company and can model those costs and the cash flows behind them. Experience in hardware, semiconductors, or another capital-intensive business helps a lot. We build in partnership with a contract manufacturer, which adds another layer of complexity.
Can build a defensible, easy-to-follow model from a blank spreadsheet, and are used to pulling your own data out of the ERP and the CRM, working from the BOM and the production schedule, and reconciling all of it back to the financials.
Understand and can explain how a hardware system sale and a support subscription combine into one set of unit economics.
Have prepared Board and executive-level financial materials, and know what belongs in the narrative and what belongs in the appendix.
Write clearly. Most of the work and communication at Oxide is written.
Enjoy running an organized, recurring process with monthly and quarterly deadlines and milestones.
Take responsibility for solving problems, are happy doing the work yourself while the team is small, and are ready to hire and lead people as it grows.
Before applying for this role, you should:
Read RFD 3, which describes our hiring process, and listen to the Oxide and Friends episode with Gergely Orosz on why we hire the way we do.
Read Oxide’s values. The questionnaire asks about them directly.
Read Compensation as a Reflection of Values, which explains why everyone at Oxide makes the same salary. This policy simplifies FP&A in some ways and complicates it in others. (For more on how the model scaled with the company, see the update, Oxide’s Compensation Model: How is it Going?)
Read LLMs as Writers in RFD 576. We strongly discourage using an LLM to write your application materials, and it shows when people do.
Get familiar with the product: the rack specifications and our documentation. These are your COGS.
Listen to a few episodes of Oxide and Friends on the business side of the company. A few recommendations:
Oxide’s $445M Series D on our most recent financing (our CFO is a guest)
Oxide’s $100M Series B on our financing last year
Scaling Manufacturing on the challenges of scaling our operations
For Want of a Resistor on the supply chain crunch
Founder vs. Investor featuring the authors of the book