Finance Operator, Business Partner

Mechanism Ventures is a company focused on automating company building to create profitable startups. The Finance Operator, Business Partner serves as a financial thought partner for portfolio CEOs and executive leadership, advising on critical financial decisions and managing the financial narrative across multiple companies.

Responsibilities:

• Advise operators on their most consequential financial decisions
• You sit with CEOs on unit economics, cash flow, runway, and growth investment
• You ask questions they have not thought to ask
• You pressure-test assumptions before they become commitments
• You are the person they call when they need to think, not just when they need a number
• Own the financial narrative
• Understand and communicate actuals against plan at a driver level. You do not build forecasts that can only be interrogated by another finance person
• Provide forward-looking commentary grounded in what the business is actually doing with intellectual honesty over optimism
• Provide deliverables that can be acted upon, not just read
• Validate the analytical layer
• Work alongside the Finance Operator, Data to define what gets built and confirm it is financially correct before it reaches anyone
• You have the acumen to know when an output does not make sense and the credibility to say so
• Handle the full financial surface area
• For any given company, there are valuations, tax considerations, SPV distributions, inter-company billing, and funding proposals. This is not a narrow role
• You will encounter the full range of financial questions that arise across a growing portfolio, and be expected to navigate them with genuine competence, not just escalate them
• A finance person first
• You can read a P&L, understand unit economics, and know when a number is wrong. This isn’t because someone told you, but because you understand how businesses work
• The technical work, the advisory work, the accounting work all sit on top of this foundation
• Built For a Multi-company Environment
• You hold financial context across multiple businesses simultaneously without confusing them
• You find it interesting that one company has a seasonality problem while another has a CAC problem, rather than wishing you could just focus on one thing
• No passengers
• You get better fast
• You build systems rather than just doing the work
• You leave functions better than when you found them
• You do not wait to be told what needs fixing

Requirements:

• 6-10 years of FP&A, startup finance, or multi-company work
• Advised founders or operators directly
• Driver-based modelling is your default
• Comfortable holding financial context across multiple companies simultaneously
• Learn fast, build systems rather than just doing the work
• Worked across a portfolio, PE-backed roll-up, or multi-entity environment
• Built financial reporting infrastructure from scratch, not just inherited it
• Enough accounting literacy to QA a close without running it yourself
• Experience with modern FP&A platforms