Country Executive

Job description

The finance function is broken. Everyone building for it is boring. Fast-growing multi-entity companies get two options: duct-tape a Frankenstack, or surrender to a corporate ERP and its consultant army. Both are bad. Both are beatable. Beating them market by market is this job. Light is the AI-native financial platform for modern companies. Fast to implement, intuitive to use, smarter every month. We call it organic software. Legora, Lovable, and Fuse Energy run on it. Product ships something worth shouting about every single week. What we don't have is a single person on the ground in your country. THIS IS NOT A COUNTRY MANAGER ROLE. Most first-in-market hires get a quota, a deck, and a flight. They repeat the London pitch in a local accent and forward complaints to HQ. This is the opposite. This is a founding hire for someone who wants far more scope than their years of experience would get them anywhere else. No entity. No local team. No local playbook. You are Light's first boots on the ground in your market, and within a year you should know that market's complexity - its rules, its buyers, its excuses - better than anyone else. It's not a leadership title. It's the seed of one. Do this right and there's a real path: stand up an entity, hire a team around you, move into product, or run the region as GM. WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING. - Sitting across from finance leaders. Real conversations, not discovery calls off a script. You find out what they actually need - the thing behind the thing they asked for - and you come back with it written down clearly enough for engineers to build against. - Being the connective tissue. Customer, product, commercial. What you learn in-market changes how Light builds and how Light sells. You are the wire between them, and the wire has to carry current in both directions. - Owning the local rulebook. Compliance, regulation, filing, the specific ways finance is done badly in your country. You're the person in the room who genuinely knows this, and you make sure it shows up in the product and in the pitch. - Having a public point of view. Ideally you arrive with a finance background and an opinion on what "doing finance right" looks like here. Bring it into the market, into the roadmap, and into how every prospect sees Light. Relationships, events, brand presence - built from zero, by you. - Closing, with London behind you. Our sales team helps you manage and push deals over the line. You bring the market and customer understanding that makes those conversations land. They support you; they don't carry you and you don't carry it alone. HOW WE'LL KEEP SCORE. This isn't a pure revenue seat, but growing your country's ARR is the primary goal and you're tied directly to that number. A starting point will be set on what you're measured against on day one and you have to prove your worth. WHAT WE'LL ASK FOR. - The thing you built from nothing. A company, a market, a GTM motion, a product. Something that existed because you hacked through a messy sale with no playbook. First question in the first call. - Credibility in front of a CFO. A finance background ideally, or enough substance that a finance leader takes you seriously the moment you walk in. You can't be the voice of the market without an ear for the buyer. - 2+ years as a founder or co-founder. Ex-founder or very early operator. We want the scar tissue. - 6+ years somewhere fast. High-growth tech, top-tier strategy consulting, investment banking, or similar. Or a body of work that makes the number irrelevant. - Structured thinking under mess. Exceptional analytical instincts, applied to markets nobody has mapped for you yet. - Fluency in your market's language and in English. Both, properly. Extra credit: exposure to accounting, enterprise software, fintech or SaaS as a user, buyer or advisor; time spent presenting to senior finance stakeholders; an existing finance network in your market - or a demonstrated, unembarrassed intent to build one. THE GOOD STUFF. 💸 Competitive salary plus potential stock options. 🏝 25 days annual leave plus public holidays where you're based. 🚀 A genuine chance to build a market from the ground up and grow with it. 🥳 Regular socials and company off-sites - the last one was in Italy. 🌍 Time with the team in London, Copenhagen, Munich, NY, Paris and wherever the action is. HOW TO APPLY. Show us who you are, not just your CV. Tell us what you built and what it did in numbers. Then answer the only question that matters: why this one? Anyone can say they want to work at a startup. A generic AI-written cover letter with no craft behind the prompt will be obvious - and is its own kind of answer. If this reads as too much scope for one person: it is. That's the seat. Light is an equal opportunity employer.