Strategic Finance Lead – Marketplace Finance Strategy

Job Description

Strategic Finance Lead | Garage

The Tone:
This is a full-time role at Garage, located in New York, NY. Garage powers the exchange of critical assets across America’s essential industries, starting with fire departments, by automating the entire transaction process from discovery to financing. Garage is a fast-growing, early-stage company currently with fewer than 35 employees. This role is pivotal in building the financial operating system that helps Garage scale a transaction-heavy marketplace with speed, discipline, and clarity, partnering directly with the CEO on the company’s most important decisions.

The TL;DR
• Role: Foundational Lead
• Type: Full-time
• Location: In-person, New York, NY
• Pay: $150000–$275000 yearly
• Team: Reports to the CEO; partners with founders, functional leaders, and the Senior Accountant.
• Mission: Build the financial operating system that helps Garage scale a transaction-heavy marketplace with speed, discipline, and clarity.
• Tech Stack: Ramp, Carta

What You’ll Actually Do
• Modeling: Build and own Garage’s operating model, encompassing revenue, GMV, take rate, gross margin, burn, runway, headcount, and cash-flow forecasting.
• Metrics & Insights: Define and maintain the financial metrics critical for a marketplace business, translating transaction data into clear insights for key stakeholders.
• Planning: Lead company-wide planning cycles, including budgets, hiring plans, spend, and growth initiatives, to clarify investment tradeoffs.
• Reporting: Develop monthly and quarterly reporting packages that explain business performance, its implications, and subsequent decision points.
• Systems: Build scalable finance systems, dashboards, metric definitions, and planning processes to support Garage’s future growth stages.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Foundational Lead with 5+ years of experience in strategic finance, FP&A, finance and strategy, corporate finance, investment banking, private equity, consulting, business operations, or a finance role at a high-growth company.
• Experience: 5+ years building financial forecasts, scenario analyses, unit economics models, and cash-flow projections from scratch, and partnering with senior leaders on budgets and resource allocation.
• Skills: Strong financial modeling skills, deep understanding of startup operating metrics like GMV and take rate, and excellent written and verbal communication to translate analysis into recommendations.
• Bonus: Experience in marketplaces, fintech, payments, lending, logistics, government technology, or transaction-heavy businesses, especially at a venture-backed startup through Series B.