Strategic Finance Senior Associate

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy.

The Strategic Finance team is responsible for providing data-driven insights to inform strategic, financial, and operational decision-making across the company. We’re seeking a Strategic Finance Senior Associate to support the Research & Development (R&D) organization, the teams that design, build, and scale the technology behind Toast’s all-in-one restaurant platform, and to help drive R&D FP&A across the function. In this high-impact role, you’ll work closely with business leaders and cross-functional stakeholders to deliver analytical insights, support business planning, and inform decision-making.

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

• Serve as a day-to-day finance partner to leaders and teams across the R&D organization, supporting investment, headcount, and resourcing decisions in a fast-paced environment.

• Build and maintain financial models across headcount, vendor and cloud spend, capitalized software, and program investment, and translate them into clear, actionable operational recommendations.

• Deliver monthly and quarterly quantitative and qualitative analysis of R&D financial results, including variances to plan, ensuring key issues, risks, and business drivers are understood and highlighted.

• Support the annual planning and long-range planning processes for R&D, incorporating an understanding of product and technology roadmaps, team structures, and scaling needs.

• Contribute to strategic initiatives through a combination of business partnering, analytical insight, and project management.

• Proactively identify trends and areas of opportunity, surfacing insights that influence cross-functional strategic and operational decisions.

• Collaborate across all levels of the organization by building strong cross-functional relationships and developing a deep understanding of Toast’s business model, including unit economics, product and market strategies, competitive context, and internal processes.

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or related field

• 5+ years of experience in Strategic Finance, FP&A, investment banking, consulting, or a similar analytical role

• Comfortable working cross-functionally, communicating complex financial information to non-finance audiences

• Strong Excel and financial modeling skills. Ability to distill complex analyses into structured outputs used by teams throughout the company to size opportunities and build business cases for pursuing new initiatives

• Effective communication and project management skills; highly organized, independent, and self-motivated, with ability to present to all levels of management

• Ability to think creatively and critically, and thrive in a dynamic and often ambiguous work environment

What will help you stand out (Nonessential Skills/Nice to Haves)

• Experience supporting an R&D, Engineering, Product, or other technology function

• Public company Strategic Finance background

• SaaS industry experience a plus

• Working knowledge of Adaptive, NetSuite and Zip

• Working knowledge of SQL or experience with BI tools

AI at Toast

At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn. We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality. We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired by how our Toasters are