Head of Controllership

Job description

## **Can you help us fix the world's most broken supply chain?** The fashion industry produces over 100 billion garments a year. 60% end up in landfill, not because people don't want these clothes, but because the supply chain for getting secondhand fashion from donation to resale is completely offline, manual, and broken. Fleek is fixing this. **Our mission is to make secondhand the first choice.** We're building the infrastructure powering the global secondhand clothing trade, through a B2B marketplace and the AI systems digitising the supply chain behind it Through Fleek, vintage stores, online resellers, and retail buyers source graded secondhand inventory directly from wholesalers and rag houses across multiple countries. Our key enabler is FleekSort, an AI model fine-tuned on secondhand fashion, that can grade, price, and categorise items with just a photo, turning what has historically been an opaque and manual trade into a structured, searchable, and tradable global inventory layer. Since 2022, we've saved 9 million items from landfill and tripled in size year-on-year. We've raised ~$50M from a16z, Y Combinator, HV Capital, and others, and have recently closed our Series B. Our advisors and private investors include operators behind Depop, Shopify, and Postmates. Today, we serve thousands of resellers and retailers across the UK, Europe, and the US. With the secondhand fashion market projected to reach $350B by 2027, Fleek is building the AI-native operational and financial backbone for secondhand commerce globally. We're looking for people who want to build something that matters, and move fast doing it. Sound good? Keep reading. ## **About the Role** We’re hiring a Controller to build the next layer of Fleek’s finance function. This is a senior individual contributor role sitting within Finance, focused on creating a scalable controllership foundation in a business that has grown fast and now needs stronger process, rhythm, and control. You’ll work closely with leadership and cross-functional teams to design how accounting should operate as Fleek scales. ## **Why This Role Stands Out** At most companies, a Controller steps into an established finance function and improves it incrementally. At Fleek, you’ll be doing something much more interesting: building controllership in a company where the business has real scale and complexity, but parts of the accounting operating model still need to be designed from the ground up. In practice, that means you won’t just maintain processes, you’ll challenge them, rebuild them and create the operating cadence the company grows into. This role is especially compelling for someone who has seen what “good” looks like in a larger or more mature environment, but also knows how to operate in the messiness of an early-stage company. Some systems already exist here. Some may need to be rethought entirely. The opportunity is to bring judgment, structure, and momentum to help establish the finance discipline that underpins the next phase of Fleek’s growth. ## **What Makes You a Fleek** ***Controller*****?** - **Builder Mentality:** You don’t just inherit processes, you redesign them when they’re not fit for purpose. You’re excited by the idea of creating a controllership function, not just running one. - **Comfortable with Ambiguity:** You know how to operate when the company isn’t at zero-to-one, but the finance function partly is. Existing processes don’t intimidate you, even when they need to be torn down and rebuilt. - **High Agency:** You don’t wait for perfect alignment or clean inputs. You can drive an agenda, create momentum and push important operational changes through the organisation. - **Influence Through Credibility:** You can create buy-in outside finance, whether that’s around month-end discipline, information flows or better controls. People trust your judgment because it’s practical and grounded. - **Scale-Informed:** You’ve seen systems and accounting environments at scale, and you know how to apply that pattern recognition without becoming rigid or over-engineered. ## **What You'll Do** - **Build the Controllership Foundation:** Design and establish the accounting processes, controls, and operating rhythm Fleek needs for its next phase of scale. - **Redesign What Doesn’t Work:** Assess existing systems and workflows, identify where they break down, and rebuild them where needed rather than patching around weak foundations. - **Own the Month-End Operating Cadence:** Create a cleaner month-end close rhythm across finance and partner teams, including stronger deadlines, accountability and information flow. - **Drive Cross-Functional Discipline:** Work with teams outside finance to improve the quality, timeliness, and consistency of inputs into the accounting process. - **Bring Scale to an Early-Stage Environment:** Use your experience from larger or more mature organisations to help Fleek build a finance function that is robust without becoming bureaucratic. ## **What You Bring** - An accounting qualification such as **CA, CCA, or CPA** - Experience in scaled environments, such as MNCs, big tech, or similarly mature operating environments - Experience building accounting systems or processes from scratch, not just operating within established ones - Early-stage company exposure, even if your role there was not the most senior finance role - Strong stakeholder management and the ability to drive change outside the finance team - Good judgment on where to add structure versus where to stay lightweight - Remote or distributed team experience is a plus - Multi-entity experience is a plus - A data-driven or product-adjacent mindset is a plus - A genuine excitement for building something from scratch inside a fast-growing company. ***Ready to build the infrastructure for the world's fastest-growing fashion economy? If you want to work on genuinely hard problems, with a world-class team, at a company that's tripling annually, we'd love to hear from you.*** **The Practicalities** - **Location:** London HQ, E1, Spitalfields / Shoreditch - **Work model:** In Person, with trust based flexibility - **Stage:** Post-Series B, hyper-growth - **Team:** 100+ across London, India and Pakistan - **Culture:** High ownership, non-hierarchical, fast-moving. Founder-led with strong opinions loosely held. ## **What's In It for You?** ***Fleek is building the technology infrastructure for a $350 billion market that has never been digitised. Joining now means you'll be part of the team that defines how the secondhand economy works, at scale, globally.*** **Why people join Fleek** - **The problem is real:** 9 million items saved from landfill since 2022. 17,400 tonnes of CO₂ avoided. Your work has tangible, measurable impact. - **The AI is genuinely novel:** FleekSort is the world's first LLM fine-tuned on secondhand fashion. This isn't a GPT wrapper, it's a proprietary model solving classification problems that don't exist anywhere else. - **The growth is exceptional:** tripling annually, backed by a16z, Y Combinator, HV Capital and others. - **The timing is perfect:** EU regulation is mandating the infrastructure Fleek builds. The secondhand market is growing 3x faster than new fashion. You're catching a wave. - **You'll have real ownership:** 100-person company, no bureaucracy. You'll shape decisions and see the impact of your work immediately. ## **Benefits** - Equity / share options - Pension - Private health benefits - Learning and development budget - Team socials and offsites ## **Our Values** ***Five values shape how we work at Fleek:*** - **Dream Big and Disrupt Yourself:** Push the most ambitious version of what you're building. Step out of your comfort zone. Nothing is out of reach. - **Absolute Ownership:** The buck stops with you. Drive initiatives to completion. Experiment, learn, persevere. The job isn't done until the job is done. - **Curiosity Leads the Way:** Don't accept anything at face value. Ask questions you don't know the answer to. That's how you innovate. - **Talk to the Customer:** Deeply understand their challenges, motivations, and ambitions. Every decision starts with the customer at the centre. - **Embrace Diversity:** A global team building for a global supply chain. Bring your authentic self and embrace the diversity of everyone you encounter.