Strategic Finance Manager, Infrastructure and R&D

About this role

ABOUT US: Fireworks is the platform for specialized intelligence, enabling companies to build, train, and serve AI models tailored to their own data, workflows, and products. Founded by the team behind PyTorch and backed by AMD, Atreides, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, and TCV, Fireworks powers production AI with hundreds of state-of-the-art open models across text, image, embedding, audio, and multimodal workloads.

Today, Fireworks is a Series D company valued at $17.5 billion, bringing together an ambitious, collaborative team that's building the future of enterprise AI. ABOUT THE ROLE This role owns the financial analysis behind our two largest investments: GPU infrastructure and R&D. On the infrastructure side, you'll model how we contract for capacity, how efficiently we use it, and what it costs to serve inference — the drivers that determine gross margin.

On the R&D side, you'll partner with Engineering, Product, Security, and IT on headcount planning, tooling and vendor spend, and the operating budget. You'll work directly with leaders across infrastructure, engineering, product, and finance. It's an early to mid-career role with real scope, built for someone with a sharp analytical foundation who wants to understand how the business actually runs and help build the function and processes that enable Fireworks to scale.

WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own the compute model: Build and maintain the financial model for our GPU fleet — capacity commitments, utilization, cost per GPU-hour — and how all of it flows through to unit economics, gross margin, and cash. - Support R&D finance: Serve as a finance partner to Engineering, Product, Security, and IT. Support R&D planning end to end: headcount and hiring plans, tooling and vendor spend, and the operating budget.

- Support capacity planning: Serve as a source of truth for what capacity we hold, what we've committed to, and what we're actually using; partner with infra on the plan of record. - Analyze capacity commitments: Evaluate commitment structures and contract terms with cloud and GPU providers, surface optimization opportunities, and track provider performance and credit refunds. - Negotiate and manage vendors: Partner on software, tooling, and infrastructure vendor negotiations and renewals, bringing the analysis that gets us better terms.