Why your next hire might be a finance engineer

Every era of finance has had its scarce skill: accounting, then dealmaking, then planning and metrics. As a16z put it in You Need a New CFO, "Today's scarce skill is something new: designing the operating system." I believe this new skill requires new roles, including the finance engineer. 

Businesses are moving from internet speed to agentic speed. Finance has to guide pricing, expansion, and capital allocation across markets, entities, and currencies in close to real time. At OpenAI, Sarah Friar is working towards a zero-day close where finance runs as a continuous function, rather than a periodic one.

At Airwallex, my team has embraced this principle. It's exciting, but it can also create AI sprawl: dozens of tools, inconsistent standards, and projects that stall at the last mile.

Why you need a finance engineer

Citizen developers know the domain better than anyone. Where they get stuck is everything around the build, from scoping and data access to deployment and InfoSec. Some start ambitious projects that they can never realistically finish.

Without someone owning the whole picture, you can end up with one of two scenarios. Either nothing gets built, or too much gets started and never completed. 

Half product manager, half builder

The finance engineer decides on the projects worth building and makes sure they get into production. 

On the product side, it starts with owning the roadmap. Our finance engineer runs an initiatives tracker with defined owners, testers, and blockers, and shares a weekly status update on Slack. That visibility keeps things moving.

They also set the standard operating procedures for citizen development. For example, every project needs a product requirements document (PRD), even if it's only a few paragraphs. Defining requirements upfront saves time later and often reveals a simpler solution. Citizen developers are also required to recruit beta testers early and keep them engaged as co-owners, so velocity doesn't drop after v1 ships. And when there’s a technical complication or security blocker, they work with the finance engineer to find solutions and liaise with InfoSec.

Just as important is sharing what we learn. We run weekly AI demos and keep an apps database and FAQs, so nobody has to start from scratch. We also share Skills, repeatable AI workflows anyone in Finance can pick up and run, so the team spends less time building them and more time reviewing the output.

The other half of the role is building. Our finance engineer personally owns the most complex, high-impact projects.

Pragmatism is key

The first thing I looked for in a finance engineer was a strong eye for pragmatism. Today you can solve a problem with an app, a script, or an agent Skill, but what matters is choosing the right tool for the right job. 

Take budget data collection, for example. We considered building a custom tool, but found that people preferred Google Sheets, and a bespoke app would have had to handle endless edge cases. Instead, we built a Skill that transformed each sheet into our consolidated format. This let budget owners stick to their preferred behaviour, saved us weeks of development time, and still gave us the benefit of automation.

Other workflows require more than a locally run Skill. Statutory reporting, for example, requires cross-team collaboration. There, we built an in-house application with audited templates, mappings, and controls, which agents can operate via MCP. Teams get a shared interface to review the report, and agents can quickly draft and cross-validate it.

The second thing I looked for was the ability to build relationships. Subject matter experts (SMEs) know the product requirements, but a good finance engineer helps them see automation possibilities they hadn't imagined. Early on, the finance engineer asks for SMEs’ time before they see any benefit. They help because they like the person, because leadership expects it, or because they're curious. I'd like to think it's mostly curiosity. But usually it's the first two, which is why relationships matter so much.

Relationship-building extends beyond Finance. Most processes span data, product, and engineering, so they require a clear owner to keep them moving forward. When our Tax team spent two weeks tracing data across the ledger, billing, and issuing systems, it became clear that this cross-domain work was exactly where a finance engineer shines.

The best finance engineers didn’t start out as engineers

More often, I’ve found that the best finance engineers are finance people who picked up software development because they kept running into problems they wanted to solve.

So I look less at the CV and more at what someone has built. If they're in a job, what have they automated? If they're studying, are they doing side projects or hackathons, and is their GitHub active? Are they using the latest tools in their own lives, even running coding agents from their phone?

Curiosity matters just as much. I like to ask candidates to explain a technical concept they've taught themselves, whether that's how an agent harness works or how an HTTP request travels from client to server and back. If those aren't their areas, they can pick a domain they know well. What I'm listening for is depth of knowledge that comes from personal interest rather than a job requirement.

The last trait is ownership. I’m looking for someone who works hard to earn buy-in from senior leadership and the teams they support, and to build momentum on their own. Without that, even a strong builder will face obstacles.

Finance is now the growth engine for business

As CFO, my job is no longer just to report on how the business runs. It's to help design the system it runs on. That means Finance owns the finance AI roadmap: defining the baseline, prioritising effort, and owning the data foundations.

Tools alone won't get you there. It starts with the right skills on your team, and a finance engineer who sets the standards for AI deployment and helps everyone else build well. In my view, that's the key hire to turn Finance into an engine for business growth.

Our finance engineer shares what’s involved in leading our team’s AI transformation. You can watch that video here.