Head of Finance – First Finance Hire

About the role

Adaptyv is building an automated lab where AI agents run biology experiments, and it is hiring its first finance hire. The finance function will be built from scratch, with ledgers, billing, cards and payroll exposed via APIs and closed programmatically. The role is hands-on and covers forecasting, closing, cash, compliance, investor reporting, equipment leasing and automation.

Key responsibilities

• Build the financial model: bottom-up from lab capacity, throughput and price per protein, and top-down P&L, burn and runway.
• Own gross margin and pricing with commercial, including what products and customers lose money.
• Run the monthly close, group consolidation and intercompany management.
• Manage bank and card accounts across Switzerland and the US, AP runs, AR collection and payment timing.
• Handle tax, VAT, audit, payroll and compliance with external firms.
• Support investor reporting and fundraising, and manage treasury.
• Oversee equipment leasing and asset management for the lab's instruments.
• Automate all of the above.

Required profile

• Several years in finance at a startup that scaled, ideally having set things up from the start.
• Swiss and European finance experience; a US entity alongside a Swiss one is a plus.
• Ability to build a real model linking operations to cash, and to write code or be ready to.
• Understanding of the cost structure of a physical business (reagents, instruments, capex vs COGS, yield loss).
• Ambitious, trustworthy with salaries, revenue and investor information, and willing to work across the company.

Required skills

• SQL (hard requirement)
• Python (ideally)