Cost Accountant and AI Finance Lead

THE OPPORTUNITY:

This is a finance role first. You will own the accounting and costing work that keeps the business informed, and over time you will rebuild how that work gets done using AI and automation as you go.

We are not looking for a traditional Cost Accountant who will run the same monthly cycle for the next five years. We are equally not looking for an AI specialist with no accounting background. If you cannot do the Cost Accounting work yourself, you cannot judge whether the AI has done it correctly, and that judgement is the whole point of the role.

Expect the first six to twelve months to sit at roughly 75% finance and 25% AI. As the finance side gets captured, documented and streamlined, that balance will shift.

WHAT YOU WILL DO:

Finance

• Own cost accounting, job and product costing, margin analysis and variance reporting

• Prepare and improve management reporting, budgets and forecasts

• Partner with operations to understand what actually drives cost in this business

• Build a documented, end to end view of how finance currently runs

AI and automation

• Identify where AI and automation genuinely fit a finance workflow, and where they do not

• Build and ship practical automations and agents that keep running after you have built them

• Redesign how work gets done rather than doing the same process slightly faster with a chatbot open in another tab

• Review and correct AI output with the judgement of someone who knows the underlying work

• Share what you build with the rest of the business and help others apply the same approach

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR:

• CA, CPA or equivalent, with a solid 5 to 7 years of cost accounting or management accounting experience

• Genuine daily use of AI tooling such as Claude, Copilot or ChatGPT, well beyond occasional experimentation

• Practical capability with prompt engineering and agent or workflow building tools

• Strong ERP and systems experience, and real comfort with spreadsheets and data

• Sound judgement about when human oversight has to stay in the loop

NICE TO HAVE:

• Light scripting or automation experience such as Python or SQL

• Experience documenting and rebuilding a finance function rather than inheriting a working one

• Experience helping others build their own automations

DON'T TICK EVERY BOX?

Please apply anyway! We’re not looking for a perfect CV. If you’re a seasoned accounting professional, we’d still love to hear from you.