VP, Strategic Finance - CA

Emergence (Automotive Group)

New York / San Francisco

$200,000 to $375,000, depending on years of experience

Emergence Automotive is the Auto Tech portfolio within Emergence, a thematic holding company backed by The Pritzker Organization. We buy and build category-defining software businesses in and around the car business: vehicle acquisition, inventory management, dealer workflow, and the tools operators rely on every day. Emergence is not a passive investment platform and not a traditional Private Equity Fund. We work closely as an embedded team with our companies and continue to build the platform through acquisitions and organic growth initiatives inside the vertical.

Today the automotive portfolio represents more than $35 million of ARR across several businesses, with a live M&A pipeline that is active and accelerating. That mix, real operating companies today, plus a steady stream of acquisition opportunities, is what makes this role different from a traditional finance seat.

This is a VP role on a small, high-ownership team reporting to the operating partners in Emergence Automotive and the Head of Strategic Finance. The center of gravity is operating finance: working directly with portfolio company CEOs and leadership teams to understand performance, improve decision-making, allocate capital, and build stronger software businesses. You will be close to real operating questions, what is working, what is not, where growth is coming from, where margin is hiding, and what the business should do next.

M&A is also a meaningful part of the job because it is a meaningful part of how we grow. We are acquiring at a high velocity inside the automotive vertical, so an investor skillset is genuinely helpful here: strong modeling judgment, comfort with diligence, downside-case discipline, combination models / forecasts and a clear view on whether a deal creates value after it closes.

You should be comfortable with acquisition models, merger and mergerco models, synergy cases, integration economics, financing structures, and the post-close plan that turns a thesis into results.

The best person for this seat can move easily between the boardroom and the operating cadence. They can sit with a CEO and unpack retention, sales productivity, cash conversion, or pricing, then step back and ask whether we should buy, build, integrate, finance, or change course. We are looking for a strategic thought partner that can handle individual output like an analyst but with judgment, clarity, and a point of view that changes what we decide to do from a strategic standpoint.

Own the strategic finance cadence across the automotive portfolio, including forecasting, performance management, KPI reporting, operating reviews, and CEO-level decision support.

Build operating models that go well beyond a budget, including scenario planning, retention and cohort economics, cash and working capital, unit economics, return frameworks, and capital allocation decisions.

Partner directly with portfolio company leadership teams to turn analysis into operating recommendations, what to change, where to focus, and what needs to be true for the plan to work.

Lead and support M&A work across the vertical, including acquisition modeling, diligence, synergy analysis, integration planning, financing considerations, and the value-creation roadmap after close.

Build board- and investor-quality materials, help set finance standards across the portfolio, and raise the bar for analysts and teammates through direct feedback, crisp writing, and strong modeling discipline.

We are not looking for one perfect resume. Strong fits often come from strategic finance or FP&A roles inside SaaS or software companies; corporate development roles with hands-on M&A and integration work; private equity, venture capital, or investment banking with live deal reps early in their career; operating finance roles where you have worked directly with executives; or audit and accounting backgrounds that have since moved into commercial, strategic, or operating finance.

What matters most is that you like this kind of work and have the pace, judgment, and ownership to do it well from both an organic and inorganic standpoint.

You can move from first principles to the exact cell in the model and back again without losing the thread. You like operating questions…