Finance Manager - FP&A & Controlling

About Dust

Work is being rewritten, and the people holding the pen are the ones who actually run it.

With enterprise-grade governance, flexible model choice, and a collaborative interface for humans and agents to work together, Dust empowers AI Operators at the world’s fastest-moving companies to rewire how work gets done.

With 70%+ weekly active users, people stick with Dust as much as they do with Slack and Notion. We don't get piloted and shelved. We land once, and spread. We're at an exciting stage of our journey, and growing fast.

We're serving great customers like Datadog, 1Password, Cursor, Clay, Vanta and Persona, and aim to x5 our growth by the end of 2026.

Dust is backed by Sequoia with a determined team of optimists (coming from Stripe, OpenAI, and Stanford) who like to focus on users, ship fast, and don't take themselves too seriously while doing so. The Generalist named us among the Future 50.

What You'll Do

This hire is the first dedicated FP&A and Controlling resource at Dust. The mandate is to build the financial backbone the business needs to scale: from clean accounting oversight to forward-looking models, all supercharged by AI. This is not a role where you maintain someone else's work. You build it and reinvent it along the way..

The role sits across three pillars, each roughly equal in time and importance:

1. Accounting Oversight & Controlling (~1/3)

You are not the accountant booking the entries. But you own the quality of the numbers.

• Drive the month-end close process: partner with our external accounting firms (France & US) to ensure the monthly close is clean, on time, and decision-grade, challenge entries, review accruals, ensure period accuracy

• Own the accounting-to-reporting bridge: translate statutory P&L into the management reporting. Build and enforce the chart of accounts and analytical mapping to make reporting reliable and scalable

• Flag risks proactively: revenue recognition edge cases, deferred revenue, capitalized development costs. You stand over the logic to make sure we translate the business into trustworthy accounting inputs and financial insights

2. FP&A - Model Architecture & Business Partnering (~1/3)

You are among the first persons to build FP&A at Dust. That means architecture decisions matter as much as outputs.

• Design and model the integrated financial model: P&L, cash flow, headcount planning, unit economics and metrics

• Build the annual budget process and participate to the quarterly forecast cycle and business reviews

• Support strategic analysis as needed: scenario modeling, unit economics, fundraising datarooms

3. AI & Automation for Finance - Dust4Dust (~1/3)

It is a core part of the job. Dust transforms how work gets done and we are our first users. You will be expected to build, test, and deploy Finance agents on the Dust platform.

• Identify repetitive Finance workflows and redesign them with AI: AP and AR automations, reconciliations, variance commentary, reporting drafts, data validation, … Uses cases are endless

• Develop real convictions on what AI-augmented Finance looks like in practice

• Act as a pilot user and internal advocate for Dust's product, generating feedback loops between Finance and Product

What We're Looking For

Experience and background:

• 5-7 years in Finance, with a clear arc from accounting-trained foundations toward FP&A and finance

• Exposure to both close/controlling work and forward-looking planning - you have done both and value both

• AI/SaaS company background is a plus - you understand ARR, churn, CAC, and why revenue recognition in software is not trivial

• Experience in a scaling environment where processes did not exist yet and you had to build them

Technical skills:

• Strong financial modeling: you build from scratch, not from templates

• Data-literate: comfortable with SQL or willing to learn, experienced with Data & BI tools (Metabase, Snowflake, or equivalent)

• Architecture-minded: When you build a model, a reporting structure, or a process, you ask "will this still work at 3x the complexity?" Data flows, model logic, and reporting hierarchies should feel like systems design decisions.

Mindset:

• Automation-obsessed: your default reaction to a recurring task is "how do I make this run itself"

• Builder mentality: energized by the blank page, not intimidated by it

• Communication: you can explain a P&L variance to a non-Finance person and knows what they need to see versus what stays in the model

• Business enabler: You see Finance as a function that makes the business move faster and smarter - not one that slows it down with process for process's sake. You earn trust with business leaders by being the person who shows up with options, while never losing sight of the controls and rigor that protect the company long-term

• Intellectual curiosity about AI: you don't need to be a technologist or an engineer, but you need genuine interest

Why Join

• Build from scratch: the Finance function at Dust is being designed now. Your fingerprints will be on the architecture for years.

• AI-first by default: you will use and shape the product you work for, every day.

• Scale trajectory: Dust is growing fast. This role grows with it, both in scope and seniority.

Location

We're prioritizing building our team with an in-person culture at our offices in Paris, San Francisco, and New York because we value the magic that happens when talented people work closely together.

We have an office-first culture. Some of the best things about building at Dust are the energy, the fast decisions, and the unexpected conversations that unlock a hard problem, which happen because we are in the same room. Being together is not a formality, it is how we do our best work, and it is something we actively protect.

That said, we hire people with strong judgement and we extend that trust to how they manage their time. When working from home makes more sense for what you need to get done that day, we trust you to make that call.

Why Dust

The models are powerful enough. What's missing is the product layer where AI meets how companies actually work. That's what we're building: the infrastructure that lets any team turn scattered knowledge and tools into coordinated execution with agents they build, own, and run themselves.

We use Dust ourselves every day. We get to shape how humans and agents collaborate while solving our own problems with the product we ship. That loop is rare, and it's why we move fast.

If you're excited about defining a new category and want to join a determined team of optimists who focus on users, ship fast, and don't take themselves too seriously, we'd love to talk.

Even if you don't check every box in our requirements, we encourage you to apply. We value diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and we're more interested in your potential and passion than a perfect match to our checklist.

Learn how we think and work.

• Our product constitution, a story about our mission

• Agents at work - Latent Space, podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024

• LLMs reasoning and agentic capabilities over time - dotAI, podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024