Vice President – Strategic Finance & Business Operations

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Updater is building a category-defining commerce platform with the ambition to become one of the world’s most important commerce infrastructure companies. We’re looking for an exceptional leader to build the company’s Strategic Finance and Business Operations function and help architect the next stage of growth. Reporting to the CFO, this person will sit at the intersection of finance, strategy, data, and execution, owning the financial and operating architecture required to help scale the company toward $1B+ in revenue and beyond.

You will own the company’s forward-looking financial engine, performance-management system, and a portfolio of its highest-priority cross-functional initiatives. You’ll help determine where we invest, what we expect in return, how we measure whether it’s working, and what we do when reality differs from the plan. You’ll inherit a small, high-caliber team and be expected to build a world-class function without unnecessary bureaucracy, combining sophisticated thinking with a highly hands-on, capital-efficient approach.

The mandate is simple: help the company make better decisions, allocate resources more intelligently, and turn strategy into measurable results.

What You’ll Own

Strategic Finance, Planning & Capital Allocation

• Own the company’s financial planning architecture, including annual planning, rolling forecasts, long-range planning, and scenario analysis.
• Build and maintain a driver-based financial model that connects operating activities, unit economics, strategic priorities, and resource allocation to long-term financial outcomes and enterprise value.
• Partner with the CFO and executive team on capital allocation, helping determine where the next dollar, hire, or hour of organizational capacity should go.
• Develop rigorous business cases for major investments, new products, partnerships, pricing changes, commercial structures, and strategic initiatives.
• Translate financial and operating performance into concise executive and Board-level narratives: what happened, why it happened, what matters, and what we should do about it.

Company Performance Management

• Architect and own the company’s KPI and OKR measuring frameworks, with clear leading and lagging indicators tied to the financial plan and strategic priorities.
• Partner closely with Data leadership to establish a trusted, company-wide source of truth for the metrics that matter.
• Build and maintain executive dashboards that translate complexity into clarity and make business performance immediately understandable.
• Run the company’s operating cadence, including monthly business reviews, quarterly planning, forecast reviews, and performance deep dives.
• Turn variance analysis into action by identifying root causes, establishing accountability, and ensuring corrective actions actually happen.
• Continuously improve how the company sets targets, measures progress, and holds itself accountable for results.

Business Operations & Cross-Functional Execution

• Lead cross-functional initiatives spanning GTM, Product, Operations, Data, and Finance, from initial problem definition and analysis through implementation and durable operating process.
• Develop the analytical and operating frameworks required to evaluate growth opportunities, pricing, partner economics, unit economics, organizational productivity, and resource allocation.
• Partner with the CFO and CRO on commercial planning, incentive design, capacity allocation, compensation structures, and the economics of major customer and partner decisions.
• Identify areas where organizational complexity, unclear ownership, poor data, or broken processes are preventing execution, and fix them.
• Build scalable systems rather than one-time analyses: when a problem matters repeatedly, establish the process, tooling, ownership, and metrics required to solve it permanently. 

Build for Scale Without Building Bureaucracy

• Design the financial and operating infrastructure required to scale the company to $1B+ in revenue while keeping the organization lean, fast, and capital-efficient.
• Understand what world-class looks like at scale, while exercising strong judgment about what the company needs now versus later.
• Build lightweight, durable systems before adding headcount or complexity.
• Use automation, AI, existing tools, and better processes aggressively before defaulting to new systems or larger teams.
• Continuously evaluate organizational leverage: where another person or system creates meaningful enterprise value—and where greater rigor, automation, or clearer ownership is the better answer.
• Develop existing team members while selectively adding talent where additional capability creates meaningful leverage.

Requirements

• 10+ years of exceptional performance across strategic finance, finance & strategy, FP&A, business operations, investment banking, private equity, consulting, or similarly rigorous analytical and operating environments.
• A clear trajectory of increasing responsibility. We care less about years accumulated than evidence that exceptional organizations and leaders repeatedly trusted you with larger, harder, and more important problems.
• Ideally, a combination of rigorous early-career analytical training and meaningful operating experience within a high-growth technology, commerce, payments, marketplace, or platform business.
• Experience operating through meaningful scale, ideally with exposure to a company growing through the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, while maintaining the ability and willingness to work hands-on in a lean environment.
• Exceptional financial modeling and analytical capability. You can personally build and interrogate a complex model, but your value comes from determining what the analysis means and what the company should do because of it.
• Deep understanding of forecasting, scenario analysis, unit economics, pricing, capital allocation, investment returns, and business-case development.
• Strong commercial instincts. You understand that Finance exists to improve business decisions, not simply explain historical performance.
• Demonstrated ability to build KPI frameworks, operating cadences, and performance-management systems that actually change organizational behavior.
• Demonstrated judgment around organizational scale: you understand the difference between the infrastructure required today and the infrastructure required at future scale.
• A player-coach mentality. You are comfortable setting the architecture, leading the team, and personally getting into the model or data when required.
• Strong executive presence and exceptional written and verbal communication skills. You can challenge senior leaders, simplify complicated issues, defend a point of view with data, and make a clear recommendation rather than merely presenting analysis.
• High intellectual curiosity, low ego, and a natural tendency to go several layers deeper than the question initially asked.
• Advanced Excel / Sheets capability and strong comfort with BI and analytical tooling. SQL is helpful but not required.
• Fluency with modern AI tools and agents, with a demonstrated ability to use technology to materially increase personal and team leverage. 

Compensation 

The salary range for this position is $260,000 - $300,000 annually. Factors which may affect the starting pay within this range include skills, experience, and other qualifications aligned with Updater's internal leveling guidelines.