Strategic Finance/FP&A

About Black Forest Labs

We're the team behind Latent Diffusion, Stable Diffusion, and FLUX—foundational technologies that changed how the world creates images and video. We’re creating the generative models that power how people make images and video—tools used by millions of creators, developers, and businesses worldwide. Our FLUX models are among the most advanced in the world, and we're just getting started.

Headquartered in Freiburg, Germany with a growing presence in San Francisco, we’re scaling fast while staying true to what makes us different: research excellence, open science, and building technology that expands human creativity.

Why This Role

You'll architect the financial planning backbone for a company scaling faster than traditional frameworks can handle. This isn't about maintaining existing budgets—it's about building planning processes, financial models, and decision frameworks that help leadership allocate resources in a market that's evolving in real time.

What You’ll Work On

You'll be the person who:

• Owns and drives the full planning cycle—annual operating plans, quarterly forecasts, rolling projections, and long-range strategic planning tailored to AI research timelines (spoiler: annual budgets don't work)
• Builds sophisticated financial models covering multiple revenue streams (API, Enterprise, Playground), GPU compute economics, headcount planning, and cash flow across US and German entities
• Delivers monthly and quarterly business reviews with variance analysis, KPIs, and actionable insights that support executive planning and board reporting
• Leads scenario planning for decisions most companies don't face: GPU provider contracts, go-to-market expansion, pricing frameworks, and R&D investment allocation where one breakthrough hire might 10x capabilities
• Partners with GTM leadership on revenue forecasting when your "pipeline" includes researchers, startups, and Fortune 500s with completely different economics
• Collaborates with Engineering on GPU compute optimization and infrastructure planning where the input is "we need more GPUs" and your job is figuring out how many, when, and from which providers
• Builds executive dashboards tracking what actually matters: ARR growth, customer cohort economics, gross margins, burn rate, and the relationship between model quality and infrastructure cost
• Designs scalable FP&A processes and drives automation across financial planning—working with Accounting to ensure data integrity and reporting consistency
• Supports high-impact strategic initiatives: pricing optimization, enterprise contract structuring, customer segmentation economics, and fundraising support

What We’re Looking For

You've built FP&A in high-growth environments where "best practices" are still being written. You're equally comfortable building three-statement models from scratch as you are explaining complex tradeoffs to non-finance stakeholders. You understand that perfect forecasts are impossible, but disciplined planning is essential. You move fast, think in systems, and know when precision matters versus when directional clarity is enough.

You likely have:

• 6-10 years in FP&A, corporate finance, investment banking, or strategic finance, with at least 4 years hands-on FP&A experience at a high-growth company
• Proven track record owning full planning cycles (annual budgeting, quarterly forecasts, long-range planning) at a B2B SaaS, AI, or technology company
• Advanced Excel/Google Sheets modeling skills—you build complex financial models from first principles, not templates
• Fluency in SaaS metrics (ARR/MRR, NDR, CAC, LTV, payback period, gross margin, Rule of 40) and ideally consumption-based pricing models
• Experience with modern finance tech stack and genuine curiosity about AI-powered finance workflows versus legacy systems
• Comfort with international operations, multi-entity financial structures, and US GAAP
• Ability to work with large datasets, perform deep variance analysis, and build dashboards that executives actually use

We'd be especially excited if you:

• Have experience with usage-based or consumption revenue models, API pricing structures, or GPU/cloud infrastructure economics
• Understand subscription economics alongside usage-based pricing in technical or developer-focused markets
• Bring exposure to enterprise contract structuring and technical sales processes
• Have worked somewhere that scaled 3-5x and had to rebuild planning processes mid-flight
• Are intellectually honest about uncertainty—you can say "here's what we don't know yet" without flinching

How We Work Together

We’re a distributed team with real offices that people actually use. Depending on your role, you’ll either join us in Freiburg or SF at least 2 days a week (or one full week every other week), or work remotely with a monthly in-person week to stay connected. We’ll cover reasonable travel costs to make this possible. We think in-person time matters, and we’ve structured things to make it accessible to all. We’ll discuss what this will look like for the role during our interview process.

Everything we do is grounded in four values:

• Obsessed. We are a frontier research lab. The science has to be right, the understanding deep, the product beautiful.
• Low Ego. The work speaks. The best idea wins, no matter who said it. Credit is shared. Nobody is above any task.
• Bold. We take the ambitious bet. We ship, we do not wait for conditions to be perfect.
• Kind. People over politics. We treat each other with genuine warmth. Agency without empathy creates chaos.

We're not just tracking expenses—we're building the financial architecture that enables a frontier AI company to make disciplined decisions at breakthrough speed. Every model you build gives leadership better visibility. Every process you implement accelerates decision-making. Every scenario you analyze shapes how we allocate resources between growth and efficiency, research investment and commercialization. If that sounds more compelling than optimizing existing budgets, we should talk.

 

Base Annual Salary: $165,000–$210,000 USD

We're based in Europe and value depth over noise, collaboration over hero culture, and honest technical conversations over hype. Our models have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times, but we're still a ~50-person team learning what's possible at the edge of generative AI.