Director, FP&A

Overview

Lead finance for GitLab's Research & Development (R&D) organization as strategic finance partner to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), owning R&D planning, forecasting, and investment decisions.

What you'll do

• Serve as the finance advisor to the CTO and R&D leadership.
• Hold partners accountable for execution against plan and connect R&D priorities to company financial targets.
• Lead annual planning and rolling forecasts for R&D.
• Own the operating plan across headcount, compensation, contractors, hosting and cloud, AI and large language model (LLM) costs, software, and tooling.
• Build frameworks that connect R&D investment to product roadmap outcomes.
• Evaluate business cases for new initiatives, AI capabilities, build-versus-buy decisions, and vendor commitments, and present risks and opportunities to leadership.
• Define and track R&D efficiency metrics, including R&D spend as a percentage of revenue, cost per engineer, hosting cost per user, and AI inference cost per feature.
• Identify large-scale savings and reallocation opportunities and see them through to completion.
• Partner with People and R&D leaders on hiring plans, location strategy, and organizational design.
• Keep headcount forecasts accurate and reconciled to actuals.
• Lead the AI transformation of R&D finance by rethinking planning, forecasting, and reporting workflows and using AI tools to make them faster, more accurate, and more insightful.
• Redesign FP&A processes, policies, and planning and reporting systems for efficiency and effectiveness, with AI at the center.
• Work with Accounting on capitalized software, accruals, and allocations, and with Procurement on process improvements.
• Lead and develop the R&D finance team: hire and coach team members, set goals and priorities, and give expert feedback.
• Put GitLab's values into practice through handbook-first, asynchronous collaboration across time zones.

What you'll need

• Extensive finance experience, including serving as the lead finance partner to an R&D, Engineering, or Product organization plus experience leading a team of analysts.
• Strong understanding of financial statements, accounting principles, and R&D cost drivers, including engineering headcount, cloud hosting, AI and LLM usage, software licenses, and capitalized software development.
• Experience leading process redesign and change in a finance team, including hands-on use of AI tools to improve how work gets done.
• Expertise in influencing senior technical stakeholders and translating complex analysis into clear recommendations for executives.
• Advanced financial modeling skills that follow industry best practices, expertise in Google Sheets, and hands-on experience with financial and data visualization tools. Excel is not used for modeling.
• A bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or a related field.
• Comfort working remotely and asynchronously, and the ability to use GitLab.

Nice to have

• Enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) finance experience.
• Direct CTO partnership experience.
• NetSuite, Sisense, Adaptive Planning, or SQL experience.
• A Master of Business Administration (MBA), Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), or Certified Public Accountant (CPA) qualification.

Details

• Location: Remote, United States. Base salary range $168,000 to $285,600 USD, excluding bonuses, equity, and benefits, for residents of the United States only.
• Full-time employment.
• Benefits include flexible paid time off, equity compensation and employee stock purchase plan, growth and development fund, parental leave, and team member resource groups.