Head of Finance Operations (FP&A & Accounting)

About Planetary Scale

Planetary Scale is a boutique strategic finance partner for early-stage climate tech startups. We serve as fractional CFOs and finance teams for venture-backed founders tackling some of the most important challenges of our time. Our clients are backed by leading investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Fifth Wall, and Y Combinator.

We combine hands-on finance operations with strategic finance and advisory support — helping climate founders manage capital, scale efficiently, and make better, faster decisions.

The Role

We’re hiring a Head of Finance Operations to lead and elevate our FP&A and accounting work. This is a true player-coach role: you’ll set the standard for excellence across our client portfolio, oversee and mentor team members, and directly own critical deliverables. Some days you’ll be reviewing financial models and coaching others; other days you’ll be in QuickBooks, updating a forecast, or preparing a board-ready report yourself.

As our client base grows, you’ll also help shape and scale the finance operations team — identifying capability gaps, refining the structure, and playing a key role in hiring and onboarding new team members to meet expanding demand.

This is an ideal opportunity for someone with a mix of Big Four accounting and startup finance experience who is ready for a leadership role with broad scope and exposure to a variety of interesting frontier technology companies and business models.

What You’ll Do

• Client Engagement: Support onboarding of new clients, lead planning & budgeting cycles, contribute to major deliverables, and parachute in on high-stakes problem-solving

• Lead FP&A & Accounting Delivery: Define and maintain standards, templates, and processes across engagements to ensure consistency, accuracy, and efficiency

• Player-Coach Leadership: Manage and mentor 3+ finance team members, raising the bar on quality and output while taking on parts of the work yourself

• Oversee Back-Office Finance Operations: Manage bookkeeping, AP, AR and payroll processes across our client portfolio, ensuring accuracy, efficiency and compliance

• Quality Control: Review financial models, reports, and accounting work before they go to clients, board members and investors

• Operational Excellence: Improve workflows, templates, and tooling to increase efficiency and excellence across the firm

• Codify Best Practices: Document and share learnings from across our client base, making PSA the repository of early-stage finance best practices

• Hire for Scale: Anticipate the needs of a growing client base, identify when and where new roles are required, and help recruit and onboard new hires to expand the team

• Roll Up Your Sleeves: Take direct ownership of key deliverables — from monthly close to updating financial models to drafting client-ready reporting packages

What We’re Looking For

• 6–10 years of progressive experience in finance/accounting, ideally Big Four + startup finance.

• Solid foundation in both accounting (GAAP, accounting schedules, close & reporting) and FP&A (budgeting, forecasting, modeling & analysis). Hands-on experience is most important; professional certifications such as CPA or CMA are a strong plus.

• Fluency in the modern finance stack (QBO, Bill, Brex, Carta, Rippling, etc.).

• Strong analytical chops and comfort building & maintaining financial models.

• Elite-level attention to detail and ability to error-check own and others’ work.

• Experience managing junior team members with a “player-coach” mentality.

• Excited about working with multiple early-stage, venture-backed startups.

• Passionate about climate tech and the startup ecosystem.

Compensation

• Base salary: $130,000-$150,000 depending on experience

• Bonus: 20% performance-based target

• Total target cash compensation: ~$156,000-$180,000

• Equity: Participation in PSA’s client equity program

Why Join Us?

• Mission-driven work at the intersection of startups, finance, and climate.

• High variety — work with multiple venture-backed founders across verticals and business models.

• Growth opportunity — step up from a finance manager role into a leadership role with client exposure and responsibility.

• Be instrumental in building out the next phase of our finance team as client responsibilities grow.

• Collaborative, remote-first team of former operators, consultants, and investors.

We're looking forward to hearing from you!