Accountant in Residence (AIR)

Job description

The Accountant in Residence (AIR) is an embedded accounting professional within the Product organization. Modeled on the venture capital "Entrepreneur in Residence", the AIR is the accounting check on what we build: precision, professional integrity and operational feasibility across the product roadmap. You will collaborate closely with product and engineering teams building FloQast’s suite of AI and automation features, to verify that they conform to real-world accounting practices and customer workflows. We are looking to blend practical accounting experience and know-how with our R&D team. This role is based in Pune alongside our research and development team. We are hiring two AIRs in India to work across the whole product. You will be the accountant in the room for engineers, product managers and designers: explaining how accounting works in practice, helping teams plan and design, answering questions, troubleshooting, and unblocking the work. You will also build and maintain FloQast’s library of out-of-the-box playbooks, step-by-step accounting procedures that AI-driven automation can run and an auditor can read. That work helps define new use cases and ideas for the product. You will work primarily with the team on the ground in India. Some meetings with colleagues in other regions will be part of the role. ### What You’ll Do **Be the accounting expert for R&D** - Act as the accountant in the room for engineers, product managers and designers across the whole product. Answer accounting questions as they come up and explain how close processes work in practice. - Help teams plan and design: shape requirements, review designs and specifications, and flag where a feature will not work for real accounting workflows before it is built. - Troubleshoot and unblock: when a team is stuck on an accounting question, an edge case or unexpected data, work through it with them and get them moving. - Explain and conceptualise: turn accounting concepts into terms engineers can build from, and explain complex accounting challenges and product solutions to technical and non-technical audiences across Product, Engineering, Customer Success and customer teams. - Serve as an internal accounting subject matter resource: help product, engineering and customer teams understand the operational accounting context behind what they are building and using. - Translate day-to-day close scenarios into clear product inputs and requirements. - Help document and define core accounting rules, SOPs and functional task workflows to be built into automated features and AI-driven automation. - Validate and test: check accounting accuracy, and alignment with standard accounting practice and operational workflows, across product features and FloQast’s suite of AI and automation features. Take part in hands-on testing and feedback loops, and give structured feedback to product teams. - Support QA, design and review: help engineers and QA plan test coverage, review designs and test plans from an accounting point of view, and work through how a feature should behave in real close scenarios. - Mock up scenarios and create data: work with the engineers to build realistic test data and scenarios, including edge cases and deliberate errors, so features are tested against how accounting really looks. - Prototype ideas on the ground: use AI tools to mock up and test ideas and concepts with the India team, and help scale what works. - Review outputs: check what features produce in test environments (journals, reconciliations, reports) to confirm the right output and information are there, and help teams review and explain them. - Apply hands-on experience across Prepaids, Fixed Assets, Bank Reconciliations, AP/AR, Payroll, Revenue and GL reconciliations to check automated workflow designs. ### **Build the playbook library** - Draft new accounting playbooks (for example payroll postings, bad debt provisions, prepaid amortization, leases, accruals, intercompany, cost allocations, cash) and add them to the library, following our house format: self-contained, procedural, runnable. - Help define use cases and ideas: identify the close processes worth automating, and document the accounting treatment, the questions a preparer must answer, the edge cases, and the journal entry and reconciliation output. - Test every playbook before it ships: build realistic test data, run the playbook end to end, check the result ties to the cent against an answer key, and record the defects you find. - Keep the library current as accounting standards, customer needs and product capabilities change. ### **Collaborate** - Work closely with the other AIR in Pune and with the Principal AIR in the UK. Share what you learn so the whole team benefits. - Support Product Marketing: answer accounting questions, help shape concepts, review blogs and ideas for accounting accuracy, and be an extra resource the team can use to understand what is going on in the product. - Work with Customer Success and other teams when accounting context is needed. - Any other tasks that may be assigned to help the company meet its goals. ### What You’ll Bring - 6+ years of accounting experience, including at manager level or equivalent responsibility in public accounting audit or in industry (controllership, financial reporting, close ownership). - The confidence to be the accounting authority in the room: you are comfortable challenging assumptions, asking the question nobody else is asking, and holding your position with senior engineers and product leaders, with clear reasoning. - Chartered Accountant, CPA or equivalent qualification. Public accounting experience is preferred; mid-market or enterprise corporate experience is equally welcome. - Broad, hands-on command of the full close: journal entries, accruals and provisions, reconciliations and month-end processes across several areas, not one narrow specialism. - Ability to explain accounting clearly to non-accountants and engineers, in conversation and in writing. You can write a procedure clearly enough that someone with no context can follow it. - A strong interest in AI, automation and how the future of accounting will evolve is a key part of this role. You already use AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT or similar) in your work, can write precise instructions, check outputs critically, and tell a correct answer from a plausible one. You pick up new tools quickly, prototype ideas, and scale what works. - Hands-on experience with one or more ERPs (for example NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, Workday or Intacct), including pulling data out of them and posting journals. - Experience in a large multinational organisation, working across a number of accounting areas and entities (multi-entity, multi-currency, intercompany). - Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with high attention to detail and standard accounting procedures. - Working pattern: your primary hours are on site in Pune, working with the India-based team. Some meetings with colleagues in the UK, US and Australia will fall outside normal India hours, so you will need some flexibility, plus overlap with UK working hours for regular check-ins with the Principal AIR. ### Nice To Haves/Other - Experience working with engineering or product teams. - Experience with FloQast or similar close-management systems, and proficiency with other office-of-the-CFO systems. - Experience writing SOPs, controls documentation or audit work programs. - Experience in implementation, consulting or process-automation projects.