Finance Manager (Cost & Operations Analytics)

VAST Data is seeking a Finance Manager to join our Operations Finance team as a core contributor in our mission to move from a reactive state to a stable, automated, and scalable infrastructure. You will own the foundational FP&A for hardware service operations, with a primary strategic mandate to lead the transition from manual data processes to automated financial integration. This role requires a professional who thrives in an outcome-focused environment, is highly analytical and can operate independently while integrating seamlessly across cross-functional teams.

Primary Responsibilities (Core Ownership)



1. Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A)

• Budgeting & Tracking: Own the end-to-end FP&A for Operations, including OPEX and COGS management.
• Headcount Management: Manage hiring and headcount tracking for the Operations organization.
• CM Program Costs: Lead the budgeting and tracking of costs incurred at Contract Manufacturers (CMs).
• Validation: Own the actual Purchase Price Variance (PPV) analysis for vendor partners.
• Close Partnership: Partner closely with accounting to ensure timely and accurate reporting of actual results.

2. Strategic Operational Modeling

• Depot Economics: Own the Depot Economics Model and lead financial analysis for all New Depot requests.
• Inventory Analysis: Manage Service Inventory financial modeling and provide insights into inventory-related costs.
• Evaluate third-party service providers: Compare outsourcing versus in-house execution based on cost, efficiency, and operational impact.
• Unit economics of hardware support costs.

3. Data Stewardship & Automation 

• ETL Transformation: Act as the steward for manual Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) processes across Ops Finance, driving their integration into automated data environments.
• Scalability: Partner with the Team Lead to build stable infrastructure that eliminates manual reporting and improves the accuracy of Service Ops COGS models.

4. Quarter End Sales Support

• Service Level Agreements: Ensure the team maintains a 24-hour SLA for hardware pricing, discounts, and CM special terms.
• Special Pricing Requests: Support special pricing analysis and decision making

Qualifications

• Comfortable operating in high-growth, fast-paced environments with shifting priorities.
• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field.
• 5+ years of experience in COGS and inventory FP&A, ideally within a hardware supply chain environment.
• Strong analytical and quantitative skills with the ability to distill complex data into actionable insights.
• Proven ability to manage complex workstreams with minimal oversight, focusing on results rather than task lists.
• Ability to build documentation that provides transparency and speeds up decision-making for stakeholders.
• Advanced experience with transitioning from manual reporting into automated dashboards.
• Excellent Excel/Google sheets skills including pivot tables, nested formulas, Index/Match, dynamic ranges etc. Macros/VBA, scenario analysis & sensitivity modeling. Driver based forecast models (lead - pipeline - sales - revenue - cash). Ability to pull from databases (NetSuite).
• Familiarity with BI tools (e.g. Tableau).