Director, Strategic Finance

About Merlin: Merlin (NASDAQ: MRLN) is a publicly traded aerospace and defense company building a non-human pilot to deliver full-stack autonomy for any aircraft from takeoff to touchdown. The Merlin Pilot autonomy system powers a growing range of aircraft and mission profiles and has been proven through hundreds of autonomous flights from Merlin's global flight test facilities, including Kerikeri, New Zealand; Quonset Point, Rhode Island; and soon, Bedford, Massachusetts. Headquartered in Boston, Merlin is expanding its organization to accelerate the development and deployment of its autonomy platform, helping customers solve some of aviation's most pressing challenges, from pilot shortages to improving flight safety. Backed by some of the world's leading investors prior to its public listing, Merlin continues to advance the certification and commercialization of autonomous flight across commercial and defense aviation.  About You: You are a finance leader with 12+ years of progressive senior FP&A or strategic finance experience, ideally with real exposure to program-based finance (Estimate At Completion, cost-type contracts, and rate structures). You've spent your career as a builder, not just a maintainer: you've personally designed cost-tracking frameworks, financial models, and process workflows. You are equally comfortable in a spreadsheet and in a room full of engineers or program managers and are able to translate an ambiguous technical roadmap into a hiring plan, a budget, and a forecast leadership can act on and track against. You don't need a fully-formed process handed to you; you build it, test it, and iterate. What should excite you about this role: it is a rare two-phase opportunity. Near-term, you build the financial infrastructure for Merlin's Programs and Engineering organizations from the ground up. Long-term, that build converts into full P&L ownership of a product line: a genuine path from builder to business owner.