Founder Associate, Finance

Position: Founder Associate, Finance →
We're a fast-growing, VC-backed travel tech startup backed by Runa Capital, Seedcamp, and Exor Ventures. We're building a product-led, automation-first travel platform designed to scale with leverage, not headcount.
We're looking for a high-impact, finance-minded builder (the kind that jumps on any problem to solve) to own, design, and build the financial, payments, and treasury systems that make the company work as we scale.
This is a builder role. You'll design our finance and payments infrastructure from scratch, not inherit it, and help shape the financial operating system of the company as it grows. You'll work closely with leadership, operate across finance, product, and operations, and report directly to the COO, with scope and responsibility closer to a mini-CFO role than a traditional finance position.
What you'll do   Build the financial backbone from scratch across payments acceptance, supplier payments, treasury, cash flow, and reconciliation.
Own payments strategy end-to-end: decide which providers to route across settlement terms, reserves, and authorization rates; maximize card rebates on supplier spend; and stand up new rails (bank transfer, airline/GDS settlement) built to run at scale, not by hand.
Be a forward-deployed extension of the product team: use the product daily, live the real payment and operational edge cases, spot friction across finance flows, and translate it into clear product and process improvements.
Bring treasury and cash-flow rigor to a business moving ~$10M a month across US and EU entities: working capital, cash forecasting, cross-border structure and more.
Automate the backoffice: extend active-cycle reconciliation, build passive-cycle automation, and improve handoffs between operations, finance, and product.
Stand up the right finance stack and ERP, modular by design, so we never get trapped in a multi-year migration.
Apply automation and AI to radically reduce manual work and achieve 10x efficiency versus traditional players.
Who we're looking for   4+ years in payments, treasury, fintech, or FP&A, ideally in high-intensity, fast-scaling environments. It's always day 1.
Financial and analytical background: degree in Corporate Finance or similar disciplines.
Hands-on and technical-adjacent: fluent in SQL and financial modeling, comfortable with data, and able to write clear specs for engineers.
A builder track record: you've torn down and rebuilt or automated a finance process before, not just operated one you inherited.
Fast learner, high agency, comfortable operating in ambiguity.
Strong systems mindset: you like structure, clarity, and execution, but you're not rigid and you enjoy crossing off to-dos.
Highly ambitious and willing to put in the work to grow fast by building real things.
Fluent / near-native English, as the team is fully international and works entirely in English.
Why this role is different   You'll be one of the early team members in a company that's scaling fast.
Real ownership from day one, no decks-for-decks' sake.
Daily exposure to extremely senior executives across travel, fintech, and product.
A rare opportunity to shape both finance and product impact together.
Clear growth path as the company scales, with quarterly performance and compensation reviews that move fast when you and the company perform.
Hybrid role: office presence + remote days   Office is based in ComoNExT innovation hub, easily reachable from Milan (20/30 mins commute by train)
Benefits: competitive salary, meal vouchers, fringe benefits, remote working days, dynamic high value added startup environment, possibility to make a real impact from day 1, early employee of a startup