Financial Analyst III

Start/End Dates: 10/26/2026 - 10/25/2027
Tax Work Location: US - CA - Sunnyvale 
Job Title: Finance, Risk & Compliance - Financial Analyst III
Onsite (hybrid) - US - CA- Sunnyvale

Budget & Commercial Operations Analyst
We are seeking a highly organized and detail-oriented Contingent Worker to support vendor budget and commercial operations. This role is crucial in supporting the day-to-day financial management of vendor engagements — ensuring budget accuracy, timely purchase order setup, reliable tracking of vendor deliverables, and clean invoice and accrual treatment. The ideal candidate is a self-starter with a strong understanding of foundational financial processes, sound judgment on accounting treatment, and a commitment to meticulous record-keeping across a growing portfolio of vendor agreements. We expect this person to actively use AI tooling in their daily work and to treat the operational processes they inherit as candidates for improvement — identifying manual, repetitive, or error-prone steps and partnering with the team to automate them rather than simply absorbing the volume.

Must-Have Skills
Transactional finance operations / PO-to-Pay end-to-end ownership
Advanced Excel with large data sets (pivots, lookups, modeling, reconciliation)
Strong accounting judgment with high attention to detail
GenAI program exposure — data annotations or data licensing
Experience at an AI lab or AI data/services vendor

Qualifications Required
4+ years of experience in a finance, accounting, procurement, or vendor operations role with a focus on transactional processing
Demonstrated working knowledge of accruals — able to explain and apply the difference between accrued, invoiced, and paid, and build a defensible month-end position where delivery and invoicing are out of sync Solid understanding of OpEx versus CapEx treatment — able to reason about how a given engagement should be classified, what drives capitalization versus expensing, and when to escalate to Accounting rather than deciding alone Strong cashflow literacy — understands the timing gap between contract execution, upfront payment, delivery, acceptance, invoice, and cash out, and how PO structure and payment terms drive it Proficiency with financial management systems (e.g., SAP, Oracle, NetSuite) and MS Office Suite / Google Suite (particularly advanced Excel/Sheets skills) Strong understanding of fundamental accounting principles (AP/AR, general ledger) and financial workflows (PO-to-Pay) Comfortable working with large datasets and operating in ambiguous environments Excellent organizational skills and a high degree of attention to detail Demonstrated ability to communicate effectively, both verbally and in writing, with internal and external stakeholders, including holding a firm line on data quality and approval gates Works with a sense of urgency for critical business requests Customer service oriented person, focused on quality communication with a bias for action Demonstrated use of AI tooling in a finance or operations context, with sound judgment about where AI output can be trusted and where it must be verified — particularly for financial figures, vendor-facing communication, and anything entering a system of record Track record of identifying inefficiencies in an existing process and driving a concrete improvement, with evidence of the impact Comfortable working in spreadsheets and workflow tools at a level beyond basic data entry — building repeatable reconciliations, validations, and checks rather than re-performing them manually each cycle

Preferred
Experience working in a fast-paced corporate or technology environment Experience using Anaplan, AppSheet, Oracle, Airtable Past experience in managing procurement and finance operations for a specific line of business Comfort working alongside technical or research stakeholders who act as delivery reviewers Hands-on experience building lightweight automations — scripting, low-code or workflow automation platforms, or AI-assisted workflows — to replace manual operational steps Experience contributing to an automation or process-transformation initiative in a finance, procurement, or vendor operations function