Anywhere in Europe
Principal - Financial Infrastructure
This is a role for the operator who takes financial products that survive their first deal to repeatable, institutional operation - and who builds the financial infrastructure every future Cenotian transaction will run on.
We are not hiring a finance analyst, and we are not hiring a program manager. We are hiring the person who sits where Finance, Legal, Data, Product and Operations meet - with personal accountability for making capital and servicing workflows work in practice, and the judgment to design functions that do not yet exist.
Context
Cenotian is the market maker for robotics, restoring industrial sovereignty in the West. We provide capital and capabilities to back physical automation projects across the US and Europe. Today, the engineers who build and install robots, machines and systems on site are under immense financial pressure and unable to scale. We remove that bottleneck, giving them the customized financing and services they need to accelerate automation in Western production. Cenotian is now in hyper-growth: launching new bets, entering new markets, and building the organizational backbone to sustain it. The Special Missions Group is Cenotian's bet-taking machine: a small number of founder-grade generalists who turn the company's high-conviction bets into shipped products. The SMG now produces a new class of problem: financial products and transaction workflows are surviving their first live deal. A workflow that clears its first transaction must run repeatably, at a known cost, with known control quality. This role exists so that every financial capability that earns the right to scale becomes durable infrastructure.
Position overview
The Principal - Financial Infrastructure owns financial infrastructure as their sandbox, with a special focus in the first months on contract primitives, funding gates, cash movement, servicing workflows and capital-partner reporting. The role sits at the intersection of the existing SMG, Finance, Legal, Data and Engineering teams - one of the most cross-functional seats in the company. This is an execution role with design judgment.
- Reports to:
- Head of Special Missions
- Location:
- Anywhere in Europe
Key responsibilities
- 01
Own bets, the SMG way
- Own bets end-to-end in the same bets approach as every SMG principal: timeboxed, gated, kill-by-default.
- Your bets are financial-infrastructure bets: taking a financing product or workflow from first live transaction to repeatable institutional operation.
- 02
Provide centralized financial-infrastructure support across bets
- Plug into bets when they create a new contract, payment, funding, servicing, reporting or control requirement - potentially several at once.
- Co-own the financial operating layer with the principal who owns the bet. You supply a kit, not a takeover: the owning principal keeps end-to-end ownership.
- Work daily with the SMG principals who own the bets, Finance on transaction mechanics and controls, Legal on enforceability, Data on structured primitives, and Engineering on durable systems.
- 03
Make live transactions work
- Turn financing agreements into machine-readable contractual primitives, monitored obligations and clear operating workflows.
- Build and run the first version of funding gates, cash waterfalls, covenant testing, reconciliations, customer cash-flow experience and capital-partner reporting.
- Remove manual re-entry and hidden dependencies from origination, contracting, funding and servicing.
- Carry personal accountability for the operating outcome, not process oversight.
- 04
Build products and services
- Spend a portion of your time building, like every SMG principal: tools, automations, workflows, data models and the products the financial-infrastructure machine itself needs.
- Ship the first version using code, AI tooling, spreadsheets, APIs and workflow software as appropriate.
- 05
Design how financial infrastructure evolves, leave playbooks behind
- The whole playground of financial infrastructure sits under this role. As Cenotian gains transaction volume, you define what comes next: which controls must become permanent, what Finance should own, what Engineering should harden, where to outsource, where to build teams, and who to hire.
- Decide when a hacked-together workflow should spin off into its own product or function, and design what it looks like.
- Every live transaction produces a playbook: replicable for the next product, the next capital partner and the next country.
You'll know it's working when
Financial-infrastructure bets hit the operating targets set at the gate.
Owning principals describe you as a force multiplier, not a dependency.
Contractual obligations, funding conditions and decision records are structured and monitored by default.
The second transaction of any product runs faster than the first because the playbook exists.
Capital-partner reporting comes from a reliable source of truth rather than bespoke reconstruction.
Functions spin off at the right moment: designed, controlled, staffed and documented.
Candidate profile
What we require
- A track record as a top operator: has taken products, transactions or functions from zero to live and delivered on ambitious targets.
- Ships outcomes in ambiguous, thinly-resourced environments where the playbook does not exist yet - and writes it as they go.
- Understands cash flows, incentives, controls and the three financial statements, and can translate them into operating systems.
- Has carried personal accountability for a financial product, transaction workflow or operating result.
- AI-fluent and shipping with AI tooling, collapsing what used to take a team into one person plus agents.
Nice to have
- Prior fintech, lending, asset-finance, payments, treasury, servicing or transaction-operations roles.
- Experience with machine-readable contracts, ledgers, warehouse facilities, covenants or capital-partner reporting.
- Technical or quantitative foundations and the ability to build data models and workflows directly.
Personality
- Extremely powerful operator: strong can-do attitude, high agency and ownership.
- Thrives in ambiguity, complexity and ambitious targets.
- Ego-less by design: co-owns bets with other principals and feels as accountable for their success as the colleague who technically owns the bet.
- Surfaces hard financial and control truths early.
- High stamina, sound judgment, extreme resilience.
Organizational context
The Principal - Financial Infrastructure will work most closely with:
- Head of Special Missions - sets the bet portfolio, gates missions, resolves priorities and holds the Principal accountable for outcomes.
- Other SMG Principals - own the underlying bets. This Principal co-owns their financial operating layer and supplies reusable infrastructure without taking over the bet.
- Head of Finance, VP Finance and Underwriting - define transaction mechanics, financial controls, approval requirements, capital-partner needs and the permanent operating owner.
- Head of Corporate / General Counsel - turns contracts, obligations, security, data rights and decision authorities into enforceable, reusable primitives.
- VP, Data and Head of Engineering - structure the data, integrations and production systems that harden successful prototypes into durable infrastructure.
Apply for this role
Tell us who you are and where to find you. A CV is welcome, not required.