Apollo Research on cord

Apollo Research

Finance Manager

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for Apollo Research?
Academic/Research · Machine Learning and AI
We are an AI Safety evals research organisation.
Active
4 months ago
Posted
a week ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
3 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Finance/Accounting
Experience level: Mid, Senior, Lead
Core skills considered: Accounting software, Financial reporting, Corporate finance, Tax
Other skills considered: ERP, Data Analysis, Budget modelling, Process management

Logistics

Base salary: £120K - £160K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

The Finance team consists of the Head of Finance and an interim transactional processor. You will be Apollo's second full-time Finance hire, reporting to the Head of Finance. You will own financial operations, accounting, reporting, and compliance.

AI is embedded across the business, and Apollo Finance is no different. You will work with the Head of Finance to build a finance function from first principles that scales ahead of the business's growth. You'll be expected to build and leverage AI agents and clean architecture to eliminate, simplify, and automate manual work at scale.

There is no legacy finance function to inherit, so you will build your subfunctions from the ground up. This role is suited to someone who is happy to get their hands dirty in the details of the operation, skilled at handling data, and driven to find more effective ways of doing things.

The manual processing work should reduce significantly as you and the Head of Finance build out the systems, processes, and controls. Initially, your time will be split between:

  • Day-to-day transactional processing and bookkeeping, replacing the interim processor (50%)
  • Building out new systems, processes, and controls (25%)
  • Eliminating, simplifying, and automating existing processes and controls (10%)
  • Ad hoc work, e.g., monthly close, reporting, and compliance (15%)

The team is deliberately lean and uses a sophisticated tech stack. This is not a position where you'll be one of many; you'll have significant exposure and be central to how the function evolves as the business scales, with a clear path to Financial Controller.


Responsibilities

  • Run day-to-day financial operations (Order-to-Cash and Procure-to-Pay):
    Process and match supplier invoices, card expenses, and bank receipts and payments
    Prepare supplier payments
    Onboard customers and suppliers, keeping their metadata up to date
    Invoice customers and manage collections
  • Run accounting and reporting (Record-to-Report):
    Establish a repeatable monthly close, preparing manual journals and accounting judgments on accruals, prepayments, accrued and deferred revenue, payroll, intercompany, and project accounting
    Prepare supported reconciliations for every balance sheet account, and maintain a quantified risks and opportunities list
    Produce a monthly pack that ties to the ledger and reads the way operators run the business: P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow, month and year to date; one headline variance against budget; and department and research-versus-commercial views
  • Deliver cash visibility:
    Prepare the weekly 13-week direct cash forecast, including running scenarios for the Head of Finance and COO
    Reconcile forecasts to actual bank movements, explain and report variances, and improve the forecasting assumptions week on week
  • Support the Head of Finance in building effective systems, processes, and controls:
    Eliminate, simplify, and automate manual work, processes, and controls at scale, leveraging AI agents and automation
    Document critical workflows so they do not depend on one person
    Manage the finance tech stack, and support the Head of Finance in implementing new systems
  • Manage compliance:
    Support the Head of Finance in ensuring Apollo complies with relevant laws and regulations across the jurisdictions in which we operate, coordinating with advisors where necessary: statutory accounts, taxes, transfer pricing, R&D tax credits, audits where required, and expenditure responsibility requirements for grants

Requirements

  • Sound accounting judgment. You are a qualified accountant (ACA, ACCA, CIMA, or CPA) with at least two years' post-qualification experience at a small, UK company. You reason confidently through cut-off, accrued and deferred revenue, accruals and prepayments, payroll, and project accounting. You know when to ask for specialist advice rather than guess. You are skeptical by default.
  • Personal ownership of a fast close. You have personally (not through a team) run monthly closes end to end to working day five, with supported reconciliations for every balance sheet account. You have personally produced multi-dimensional management accounts (product, channel, region) with variances to budget, built around how operators run the business.
  • Balance-sheet-first mindset. For any account, you can explain what the number is, how it got there, how and when it settles or unwinds, and what happens if it does not.
  • International group experience. You have practical experience of intercompany accounting and consolidation, you have worked with at least one overseas entity (US preferred), and you know UK statutory reporting.
  • Hands-on builder. You have built, materially improved, or repaired a finance process, control, or set of books. You prioritize the material problems. You are a high-agency, first-principles problem solver who can take a problem, break it down logically, and find a solution. You are comfortable making decisions with incomplete information.
  • Fast, accurate transactional processing. You process invoices, card receipts and bills, and cash receipts and payments.
  • Architecture-minded and data-literate. You think in systems, not processes. You are fluent in a cloud ledger (Xero, QuickBooks Online, Campfire, Light, Rillet, or DualEntry) and strong in spreadsheets. You understand how data and workflows fit together. You can validate integrations, imports, mappings, and automated outputs.
  • High standards. You have exceptional attention to detail, integrity, and strong numerical ability. You are tenacious enough to call a customer for the fifteenth time. You communicate clearly with non-finance colleagues.

Company Benefits

We offer a competitive UK-based salary with flexible work hours. Enjoy unlimited vacation and sick leave. We also provide lunch, dinner, and snacks on workdays. You'll have the opportunity to join paid work trips such as staff retreats, business trips, and conferences. Additionally, a yearly $1,000 (USD) professional development budget is available.
Finance Manager at Apollo Research
Position posted a week ago

Talk directly
to who's hiring

cord intros you to the companies worth joining, from seed to enterprise.

Everything you need to find work

Surface every relevant position, direct message the people hiring and manage all your applications in one place.

Get started

Every position in one place

We index the web for open positions that might be relevant to you and bring them all in one place.

Positions you might like split into tabs based on their type

Direct messaging

No more CV blackholes. Message people hiring directly and see their activity live on cord.

A sent message to a hiring manager
A board of positions in different stages

Application management

Manage all your applications and interviews in one place.

Advanced insights

Know your worth and see how you compare with other applicants.

Visualisation of a profile match score for a position and score comparison with other applicants

Direct.
Transparent.
Human.

On cord you can message people hiring directly, see when they were last active, how responsive they are and access transparent information that you wouldn't be able to find anywhere else.

Photos people at Starling BankPhotos people at Starling BankPhotos people at Starling BankPhotos people at Starling BankPhotos people at Starling Bank
Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
Alex Yeates on cord
Message Alex Yeates at Starling Bank
Typically responds in an hour

What people are saying

2,000+

users joining every week

Oliver on cord

Oliver

Software Engineering Consultant
It's really easy to use, has a solid selection of jobs, and makes it helpful to direct message companies. The platform seems to offer a good range of opportunities while keeping the process simple and convenient.
November, 2025
David on cord

David

Lead Software Engineer
The platform allows you to create a professional CV, making the setup process simple and polished. The internal chat also provides an easy way to directly contact hiring companies, which makes communication much more efficient.
November, 2025
40,000+

open positions

Nicolae on cord

Nicolae

Senior Full Stack Developer
It is a great platform if you are looking for a job. It makes the search process straight forward and gives you access to solid opportunities.
November, 2025
3 million+

messages exchanged so far

Nicolae on cord

Nicolae

Senior Full Stack Developer
It is a great platform if you are looking for a job. It makes the search process straight forward and gives you access to solid opportunities.
November, 2025
84.27%

response rate from companies

Aarambha on cord

Aarambha

Associate Software Engineer
Absolutely amazing idea, the ability to see which recruiters are active makes finding opportunities very quick. There is a form of transparency built into the website that lacks in any other job searching platform.
August, 2025
Adam on cord

Adam

Senior Engineer
cord was great. Clean UI, easy to browse, and the data feature made it a breeze to quickly check whether my profile would match up well with a particular role. The messaging system made it easy to approach companies but also filter out unwanted requests.
August, 2025
4.6

score on Trustpilot

Talk directly to the people that matter

Join the hundred of thousands of people using cord to find work

Get started
 on cord
 on cord
 on cord
 on cord
 on cord
+450 joined last week
Moved to your Not right positions