Finance Manager

About Nous

Nous is a household AI agent. It takes over the bills and admin people don't have time for and acts for them: switching energy, buying insurance, cancelling forgotten subscriptions, managing the family calendar. Nearly 250,000 UK households have signed up, and another joins every minute.

We think the real value of AI isn't writing amazing cover letters, it's doing useful things in the real world for real people. That's the hard part, and a brilliant product is only half of it. An energy switch takes weeks, so our agents run on long-running workflows, not a single chat turn. Cancelling a subscription means a browser agent handling the code Apple sends to your phone. Buying insurance meant getting our regulatory principal comfortable with an agent doing it end to end (a UK first), which comes down to knowing exactly when the LLM should hand over to rules because a mistake would cost someone real money.

We're about 30 people running one agent across energy, broadband, mobile, insurance, mortgages and subscriptions (with more being added), each with its own suppliers, rules and ways of going wrong. With far more problems than people, a person or small team owns each one end to end, from spotting it in the data or a customer conversation to shipping the fix. And because the agent acts, you find out quickly whether the fix worked.

Everyone builds here: a product engineer launched our subscription cancellation product within a couple of months of joining, and a PM rebuilt our WhatsApp agent.

And it's working. We're growing more than 20x year on year, with a market-leading NPS above +80, and we manage well over half a billion pounds of household spending. We've raised more than $30M from Heartcore, Mosaic and a who's who of entrepreneurs who founded Monzo, GoCardless, lastminute.com and Onfido. But the real draw is the team - ask anyone here why they joined and you'll get some version of "to do great work with really smart people".

The goal is household life that's simpler, cheaper and fairer, and most of that is still to build.

Our Culture

We are an AI-native business where everyone builds and ships, Finance included. We believe the best Finance teams don’t just report on what happened; they build the systems, processes and controls that help the business move faster.

We offer real ownership, real trust, and the freedom to build things that would normally take a much bigger team.

Finance has entered its Building era

Yesterday’s finance teams governed money; today’s finance teams increasingly help build and architect the automated systems that consume, move and generate it. That means Finance can’t just look at an Excel sheet at month-end and explain what happened. It needs to be much closer to the action: building data infrastructure that makes these economics visible, sitting alongside engineering teams, creating automated guardrails, and understanding metrics like cost-per-successful-task.

The opportunity isn’t just to control what gets built; it’s to help build it better from the start.

About the Role

You’ll join as the second person in our Finance team, working directly with Michelle Stewart, Head of Finance.

Michelle has an engineering background and 15+ years of experience advising, investing in and operating VC-backed tech businesses, most recently as Finance Director at Engine by Starling and VP Finance at Qogita.

This is a broad role with a lot to build. We’ve already started automating some of our core Finance workflows. So your first challenge will be to build on that foundation, improving and automating how Finance works, and putting in place the processes, data and controls that allow us to run a lean Finance function at scale.

From there, the opportunity goes well beyond running the numbers. Finance plays a central role in how Nous makes decisions, launches products and grows, and as the business becomes more complex, that role will only deepen.

You’ll take ownership across accounting, reporting, controls and the close, while working directly with teams across the business, heads of department and founders. You’ll have plenty of scope to shape how Finance operates as we scale: what we automate, what we measure, and where better financial insight can drive better decisions.

Over time, we want you to become the person we rely on for accounting judgement: someone who knows when to get into the detail, can make the right calls as new and unusual questions arise, and can build the accounting and control environment around an increasingly complex business.

We think the best Finance people increasingly combine strong accounting expertise with a builder’s mindset.

They understand how the business works end-to-end, build the systems that underpin it, automate what shouldn’t be manual, and design controls that allow the business to move quickly without losing rigour.

AI raises the ceiling on what that combination can achieve. As Finance teams become increasingly able to build and automate for themselves, accounting judgement, systems thinking and the ability to build become a powerful combination.

About You

What Matters Most

We are hiring for three things, in this order:

1. A sharp agile mind. You learn quickly, get into the detail and develop a real understanding of how a business works and what makes it tick from different angles. Smart and engaged, you thrive in a fast-moving environment. You’re comfortable with ambiguity and think from first principles rather than simply applying rules by rote. You can take a messy problem, work out what actually matters, and find a pragmatic way through it.

2. A builder. Your instinct when you see a manual or inefficient process is to make it better. You’re comfortable getting under the hood, working with data, experimenting with new tools and using AI to build and automate things yourself. This is where you will add value first, but we expect that building instinct to remain core to how you work as the role grows.

3. A solid accountant with great judgement. You’re fully qualified, with rigorous accounting foundations that have since been tested and sharpened in industry. You’ve had to apply your knowledge to real-world problems, make judgement calls where the answer isn’t always clear, and design and refine controls based on what actually works. You know when precision matters, when to dig deeper and when a pragmatic answer is the right one.

Your instinct is towards pragmatic risk management and proportionate controls.

You care about the details and about being the custodian of a reliable source of truth.

That matters here. We’re a rapidly growing business with a consumer fintech angle and increasingly complex financial flows. Good accounting and controls are the foundation we build on, and over time we want you to become someone the business can rely on for sound accounting advice as the questions get harder.

You’re ambitious about the craft of Accounting and Finance itself. You want to understand the business deeply and are looking for a greenfield challenge where you can help build a Finance function that scales without simply adding people.

This is a builder role on a Financial Controller track as Nous scales. You’ll be hands-on with the accounting and controls, but you’ll also build and automate the systems around them, understand the business behind the numbers, and get broad exposure to the commercial decisions they inform.

What You Will Bring

• A recognised accounting qualification (ACA, ACCA or CIMA), backed by rigorous training and a strong academic record.

• Typically around five years of relevant experience, ideally combining rigorous practice with meaningful hands-on experience in an operating business.

• Experience owning core finance processes and a willingness to get into the detail of reconciliations, invoicing and month-end.

• Evidence that you build: processes you have automated, tools you have created or implemented, or workflows you have set up or materially redesigned.

• Comfort with data tooling beyond Excel and accounting systems. You do not need to be a data engineer, but SQL, Power Query, Looker, Power BI or similar should feel approachable rather than intimidating.

• Strong accounting fundamentals, sound judgement and confidence applying them to real-world problems where the answer isn’t always obvious or there is no playbook.

Bonus Points

• You’re already using AI tools such as Claude or ChatGPT in your day-to-day work, particularly if you’ve used them to automate a workflow end-to-end.

• You’ve operated recurring finance processes at meaningful volume.

• You’ve designed or materially improved financial controls, or have been through an annual audit process.

• You’ve worked in a high-volume, transactional business such as fintech, marketplaces, energy or consumer technology.

• You’ve worked cross-functionally and built finance processes or systems alongside product, data or engineering teams.

How You Will Grow

Breadth always. This is a Financial Controller track, but it isn’t a narrow one. You will never be siloed. In a small Finance team at a fast-growing company, you’ll get exposure well beyond your core remit, from budgets and commercial decisions to fundraising, new products and whatever new questions the business throws at us.

You’ll work directly with Michelle, with regular exposure to the founders and senior leaders across the business. As Nous grows, so will the complexity of the problems you own and the scope of the role.

If you want to build the finance engine of a fast-growing, AI-native business, and become an exceptional modern Controller as it scales, this is the role.

Remuneration and Benefits

• Compelling packages, including share options with life-changing upside. We’ve raised enough money to pay real salaries. We're building something great together and we all share in the upside. If we win, we win together.

• An environment where you can do your best work:

  • 🏢 A great office set up for lots of collaborative working. We already need more whiteboards

  • 💻 The equipment / setup / training you need to do your best work

  • 🤝 A high-context environment with lots of exposure to the big decisions - be in the room when it happens (literally)

  • 🏡 Flexibility around remote work. If you sometimes just need to get your head down, that's fine

  • ☕ Very good coffee

  • 🍽️ A well-stocked kitchen (featuring a wildly popular toastie maker) so you can always make yourself a breakfast or light lunch on the house

  • 🎉 Informal social every week, something bigger every month, plus a set-piece event in the summer and again at Christmas - we're not robots!

  • ✈ 33 days paid holidays (including bank holidays)

  • 💊 Health and dental cash plans, including an employee assistance programme

  • 🚴 Travel benefits, including the cycle-to-work scheme and season ticket loans

Nous has an office-first culture. That means we encourage in-person working, and most people do work from the office in Farringdon most of the time. We do a lot of brainstorming, problem-solving and interaction within the team and presence makes this more effective. It also helps ensure people have good peripheral awareness and high context. But we are pragmatic not doctrinal about this, and recognise that, sometimes, certain types of work can be better done remotely. Most team members spend 3-4 days a week in the office on average.

The Environment

Most importantly, this is a high-performance, high-agency and high-trust technical environment. Nous is intentionally lean and AI-native — not just in its product but as a company. Everyone is expected to use AI to its full potential, whether that's debugging a system, streamlining a workflow or improving how customers are served. Rather than building layers of middle management, we hire smart, high-agency people and give them real ownership.

We're dedicated to fostering an inclusive and equitable workplace, and we actively welcome applications from individuals of all backgrounds. Every candidate is thoughtfully considered, without regard to race, religion, gender expression, disability or sexual orientation.