Finance & Strategy Manager | Pre-IPO

Career Trajectory: This is a high-visibility, high-ownership role that sits at the intersection of FP&A, corporate development, and strategic advisory. Working directly with the CFO and C-suite on fundraising, M&A, and board materials accelerates career progression far faster than a traditional FP&A track. It's an excellent bridge role for investment banking or PE alumni who want operating company experience without losing analytical rigor.

Compensation & Market Benchmarks: No salary is disclosed, but Finance & Strategy Manager roles at well-funded Series C/D+ startups in the US typically command $130,000–$175,000 base plus equity. Hopper's pre-IPO equity mention is a meaningful upside given the company's scale (120M+ downloads, $1B+ GMV). Candidates from IB/PE should negotiate aggressively given the experience premium requested.

Skills You’ll Build:

• Fintech and travel marketplace unit economics — a niche but fast-growing vertical
• AI-augmented financial analysis (Claude, ChatGPT, Big Query) — highly transferable
• Board- and investor-ready storytelling — critical for future CFO or VP Finance roles
• SQL and BI tooling — differentiates you from pure Excel finance professionals

Green Flags: Lean team with direct CFO access, fast-moving startup culture, real M&A and fundraising exposure, and AI tooling adoption.
Watch for: "comfort with ambiguity" and "moves fast" language signals high workload expectations — assess work-life balance during the interview process. Unlimited PTO is listed, but culture around actually taking it matters more.

About the Role

As a Finance & Strategy Manager at Hopper , you will be a finance partner to business leaders across the company, helping them understand performance, evaluate opportunities, and make better decisions. You will build the models behind our forecasts, partnerships, and strategic plans, lead business reviews, and turn analysis into clear recommendations for senior leadership and the CFO.

This role is a great fit for someone who has built rigorous models under pressure in investment banking or private equity and now wants to apply those skills in‑house, closer to the decisions. We are a lean team that moves fast, and we use SQL and AI tools like Claude to automate the manual work so we can spend our time on analysis and strategy.

What Would Your Day-to-Day Look Like

• Build and maintain integrated financial models, scenario and sensitivity analyses, and business cases for new products, partnerships, and investments
• Evaluate the economics of new commercial agreements (pricing, revenue share, unit economics, ROI) and help shape deal terms with business leaders
• Support fundraising, M&A, and capital allocation decisions, including the models and analysis behind them
• Own the monthly and quarterly forecast for the areas you support, and contribute to the annual budget and long-range plan by building driver-based models and inputs that connect operational metrics to P&L outcomes
• Lead monthly and quarterly reviews of actuals vs. plan and forecast, explain variances, and flag risks and opportunities to business leaders
• Partner with leadership on high-impact questions such as market sizing, investment prioritization, and cost optimization
• Prepare clear, executive-, board-, and investor-ready materials that tell the story behind the numbers
• Use SQL, Big Query, and AI tools to automate recurring reporting and analysis so the team spends less time handling data and more time on insight

An Ideal Candidate Has

• 4+ years of experience in investment banking, corporate development, private equity, strategic finance, or FP&A. Investment banking or private equity experience (Analyst or Associate) is preferred
• Advanced financial…