Strategic Finance Manager

About

Tau

Power conversion is the bottleneck between the compute, energy, and mobility industries and the future they're trying to build. Most of the industry is still solving it with decades-old approaches. Tau is fixing that. We're a venture-backed hardtech company in Redwood City, building power conversion technology for data centers, EVs, and energy systems. Several products are already moving into production.

We hire people who own problems end-to-end: power electronics, embedded software, controls, test and validation, mechanical design. We solve from first principles, not legacy playbooks. We're past "promising technology." Customers are buying, volume is coming, and the people who join now set the standard everyone builds on after.

About Tau

Every consequential decision a hardtech company makes - a large automotive supply deal, a capital-intensive bet, where to put the next dollar of headcount - gets made on a model somebody built. If the model is wrong, or nobody trusts it, the company makes the wrong call and doesn't find out until it's expensive.

Tau is a Series B company developing next-generation power conversion technology that's transformational to any industry it touches. Our products are already making waves with automotive customers, and we're sizing up energy, datacenters, and defense as the next markets to prove out.

We hire people who own problems end to end. On the finance side, that means deal structuring, capital allocation, pricing, planning, and market entry, not waiting for a request and handing back a spreadsheet. We're past "promising technology." Customers are buying, volume is coming, and the person who takes this role sets the standard for how Tau makes its biggest financial decisions.

About the role

You'll be our first dedicated finance hire and the person leadership turns to for framing the company's most important decisions. Some of that is model-driven strategy: should we chase this new market, what should this deal actually cost the customer, where does the next dollar of headcount or R&D spend do the most good. Some of it is infrastructure: forecasting, budgeting, the long-range plan, the basic financial hygiene a company our size doesn't have yet.

This role is high-ownership and high-ambiguity. There is no playbook here. You will write it.

What you'll do

• Model new markets. When we're deciding whether to go after energy, datacenters, or defense, you build the model that tells us if it's a real opportunity or a distraction: market sizing, unit economics, what it would actually take to win.
• Model the deals that matter. Build the models behind our large automotive deals: volume ramps, multi-year pricing structures, cost curves, margin sensitivity, and how different pricing structures play out for us and the customer.
• Shape how we allocate capital and headcount. Help leadership decide where the next dollar of R&D spend or the next hire goes, and make the tradeoffs explicit instead of political.
• Build the planning function and the infrastructure it runs on. Stand up forecasting, budgeting, and the long-range plan, and get to a P&L view leadership trusts, a forecast that updates, and the basic financial hygiene that lets everyone move faster.
• Be the finance voice in the room. Sit in on the big decisions, including fundraising prep, build-vs-buy, and new market entry, and be ready to present the analysis and recommendation directly to the board, not just the CEO. You'll work across sales, engineering, and ops as the decision requires.
• Get into the details when they matter. Occasionally that means sitting with accounting on a close question or a reconciliation. It's not the job, but you don't treat it as beneath you either.
• Who you are
• We care less about how many years of experience you have, and more about what you’ve done and in what context. You may come from management consulting or private equity, or comparable growth-stage strategic finance/FP&A experience. You've built real models under real time pressure and defended them to people who'd poke holes in them.
• Strong financial and analytical foundation, with a solid grasp of accounting concepts. You think in numbers instinctively and translate them into clear, actionable recommendations.
• Fast and fluent in Excel/Sheets. You can stand up a credible model quickly and stress-test it under scrutiny.
• A builder. Energized, not paralyzed, by a blank page. You create structure where none exists and don't wait to be told to move. We'd rather tell you to slow down than speed up.
• Board-ready communicator. You can walk into a board meeting and present your own analysis and recommendation, and hold your own on the questions that follow.
• Low ego. You'd rather be right than be senior about it. If a number needs checking or a spreadsheet needs cleaning up, you do it yourself instead of waiting for someone more junior.
• Excited by the space. Genuine interest in automotive, energy, and/or defense, and the willingness to learn the operational details that make the models real.
• Nice to have
• Exposure to capital-intensive or hardware/manufacturing businesses, or to energy or defense markets specifically. Either is equally attractive.
• Experience with complex, multi-year commercial deals or novel pricing structures.
• Familiarity with the systems a growing company runs on: CRM, BI/dashboarding tools, accounting systems.