substrate-bio - Founding Finance Lead
Requirements
• You are an experienced finance leader who has built or rebuilt a finance function in a capital-intensive, usage-priced business. The shape of the problem is what attracts you: significant CAPEX, complex revenue mechanics, and a cost model with many physical variables. You have done this before in adjacent industries, hyperscale cloud, AI compute, energy, manufacturing, lab automation, telecoms, or somewhere similar, and you can carry the lessons across without needing the company to look exactly like the last one. You want a leadership team that wants their finance partner in the room when commercial and product decisions are being made. • You write good board reports. You can build a financial model from scratch and you can defend its assumptions in a room of sceptical investors. You enjoy pricing as a problem and you have an opinion on it. You are equally comfortable in the detail (a bank reconciliation, an eligible-cost rule, a deferred revenue schedule) and in the strategy (where does the next twelve million come from, and what does it cost us to take it). • You are pragmatic about doing the work yourself for the first twelve months and excited about building the team that follows. You enjoy interviewing, hiring, mentoring, and setting standards. You will be in the office at our King’s Cross site at least three days a week, and you are comfortable with that. • Eight or more years of progressive finance experience, with at least three in a senior finance role at a venture-backed or capital-intensive growth company. • Direct experience of CAPEX-heavy operating models: depreciation policy, asset accounting, vendor contracting, and the cash dynamics of significant up-front spend. • Direct experience of usage-priced commercial models: cost-to-serve modelling, pricing design, revenue recognition under usage rules, and the operational connection between billing and product. • Track record of building or rebuilding a finance function, including the team, the cadence, and the relationship with the co-founders or executive team. • Experience of UK government grant finance, particularly ARIA, UKRI, Innovate UK, or DSIT-administered programmes. • Experience of the Series A and Series B fundraise cycle: SAFE conversion, cap table mechanics, board materials, and investor diligence. • Background in a deep-tech, science, or hardware-adjacent domain, where the finance function had to understand the physical operating model. • Direct experience designing or operationalising token-based, unit-based, or otherwise usage-quantified pricing.
Responsibilities
• Take ownership of the books, payroll, and the close. Decide what stays in-house and what gets outsourced for the next twelve months. • Sit down with each co-founder. Understand the financial model in detail. Build your own version of it if useful. • Set up the grant accounting infrastructure for ARIA and DSIT. Get the first claim out cleanly. • Stress-test and rebuild the pricing model. Take a refined token-based pricing structure to early customers and incorporate their feedback. • Stand up the management accounts and board pack. Make Substrate a company whose finances can be explained in five minutes. • Run the Year 1 audit cleanly. Set up R&D tax credit claims for the first eligible period. • Operationalise the new pricing model in the customer interface. Connect it to real billing, real revenue recognition, and the financial model. • Position the finance function for the Series A: clean numbers, defensible unit economics, and a cost model that grant funders, customers, and investors all understand. • You will report to Oli Hoy, co-founder, who leads our autonomous lab buildout and the broader operations of the company. You will work most closely with Mostafa ElSayed on commercial and fundraising matters, and with the co-founder team as a whole on the financial model and board reporting. • You are the first finance hire. Substrate is currently four co-founders growing to roughly thirty people by the end of 2026. • Our process is three stages. An initial conversation with Oli to understand what you want from the role and what we want from it. Followed by a technical session covering the operating model, the pricing problem, and how you would build and lead the finance function. Finally, an in-person founder-team session covering scope, terms, and any final questions. We aim to move fast on candidates we are excited about; expect roughly two to three weeks end to end. • If you are not sure whether you are a fit, send a note anyway. The most useful conversations we have had so far have been with people who were not sure.
Benefits
• Most finance leadership roles at venture-backed companies are either pure SaaS finance (clean ARR, clean margin, clean billing) or pure operational finance at a more mature stage. This is neither. You will be designing a finance function for a capital-intensive infrastructure business with a usage-priced commercial model, parallel grant programmes, and an in-progress venture round, while also being the person who decides how the pricing model actually works. • It is also a finance role with significant product surface area. The pricing model is one of the most important commercial decisions Substrate will make, and you will own it. Some finance leaders find that energising; some find it outside their lane. Worth knowing in advance which one you are. • We pay competitively against the London market for senior finance leaders at venture-backed companies, calibrated to seniority and to the specific scope of this role. We will discuss numbers with serious candidates after first conversations. • Equity is meaningful, with vesting on the standard four-year schedule and a one-year cliff. We can talk through the philosophy and the maths in detail when we meet. • Working pattern is hybrid with a strong in-person bias. We expect you to be at our King’s Cross site at least three days a week, and most of the founding team are in the office most days. Audits, board prep, payroll, and the kind of finance conversations that actually move things forward are easier when you are in the room. • 30 days annual leave. A learning budget you can use for conferences, courses, books, and time. The founding team operates on a weekly cadence with a Monday planning meeting and a Friday close, and a quarterly offsite. We are direct with each other, we write things down, and we expect to be challenged.
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