emergence

VP, Finance, Emergence Automotive

San Francisco
Full-time
$250k to $350k
Posted Nov 12, 2026

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Job description

Reports to the Head of Portfolio Strategic Finance and the Auto Operating Partners

SF Bay Area preferred

OTE: $250k to $350k

ABOUT EMERGENCE

Emergence Automotive is the AutoTech portfolio within Emergence, a holding company backed by permanent capital. We buy and build software businesses in and around the car business: vehicle acquisition, inventory management, dealer workflow, and the tools operators use every day. We're not a passive investor, and we're not a traditional private equity fund. We work alongside our companies as an embedded team, and we keep growing the platform through acquisitions and organic growth. The automotive portfolio has more than $35 million in ARR across several businesses and an active M&A pipeline. Real operating companies, plus a steady flow of deals, make this a different finance seat than the usual one.

THE ROLE

You'll join a small team where you own a lot. You'll report to the Auto Operating Partners and the Head of Portfolio Strategic Finance.

Most of the job is operating finance. You'll work directly with portfolio company CEOs and their teams to understand how the business is performing, decide where to put capital, and build stronger software companies. You'll be close to real questions: what's working, what isn't, where growth is coming from, where margin is hiding, and what the business should do next.

M&A is a real part of the job too, because we're acquiring at pace in automotive. An investor's skills help here: sound modeling judgment, comfort with diligence, discipline on downside cases, and a clear view on whether a deal creates value after it closes. You should be comfortable with acquisition and merger models, synergy cases, integration economics, financing structures, and the post-close plan that turns a thesis into results.

The best person for this seat moves easily between the boardroom and the day-to-day. You can sit with a CEO and dig into retention, sales productivity, cash conversion, or pricing, then step back and ask whether we should buy, build, integrate, finance, or change course. We want a thought partner who produces analyst-level work and also has the judgment and point of view to change our decisions.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

•Own the finance cadence across the automotive portfolio: forecasting, performance management, KPI reporting, operating reviews, and decision support for CEOs.

•Build operating models that go well beyond a budget, covering scenario planning, retention and cohort economics, cash and working capital, unit economics, and capital allocation.

•Work directly with portfolio company leaders to turn analysis into recommendations: what to change, where to focus, and what has to be true for the plan to work.

•Lead and support M&A across the vertical, from modeling and diligence through synergy analysis, integration planning, financing, and the value-creation plan after close.

•Build board- and investor-quality materials, help set finance standards across the portfolio, and raise the bar for analysts and teammates through direct feedback, clear writing, and disciplined modeling.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

We're not looking for one perfect résumé. Strong candidates often come from strategic finance or FP&A inside software companies, corporate development with hands-on M&A and integration work, private equity, venture capital, or investment banking (with live deal experience), operating finance roles that worked directly with executives, or audit and accounting backgrounds that moved into commercial or operating finance. Overall, we're thinking roughly 3 to 10+ years of experience. What matters most is that you like this work and have the pace, judgment, and ownership to do it well, on both organic and acquisition-driven growth.

FOR THIS ROLE SPECIFICALLY:

•2 to 5 years in a strategic finance seat inside an operating business, where you owned the plan, the forecast, and the board narrative, close to a mini-CFO

•Real operating experience. We weigh time spent running and planning a business above time spent executing or evaluating deals

•Strong financial modeling, with comfort owning operating models end to end

•Experience building a model, cadence, or reporting standard from nothing that others still use

•Clear, direct communication at the board level

•Acquisition or merger modeling is a strong plus, but this is primarily an operating role

WHAT MATTERS MOST IN THIS SEAT

You can move from first principles to the exact cell in the model and back without losing the thread. You like operating questions as much as deal questions: why retention moved, why sales productivity changed, why cash conversion looks the way it does, what the margin profile should become, and what to do about it. You don't need a big team or a perfect process to make progress, and you know how to talk to busy executives about what matters, what doesn't, and what you recommend.

You take ownership in a way that makes other people's jobs easier. You hold a high bar for the work but stay practical and collaborative, and you're not precious about how things get done. You're comfortable defending your view in the room, changing your mind when the facts change, and turning an ambiguous problem into clean analysis and clear next steps. Writing matters a lot here.

HOW WE HIRE

You'll meet with our leadership team: the Head of Portfolio Strategic Finance and the Auto Operating Partners (your direct managers), our CEO, and our Operating Partner, Human Capital. We'll also talk with a few people you've worked with to learn how best to partner with you. Along the way, you'll do a few short exercises, such as learning something new and teaching it back, and working through a realistic finance scenario. They're meant to show us how you think and what working together will actually feel like, and we'll tell you what to expect before each step.