---
title: 'Business Operations, Finance Lead at Specter'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/business-operations-finance-lead-specter-san-francisco-4vsw6pnkfyqg'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-19'
---

# Business Operations, Finance Lead at Specter

- **Company:** Specter
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-19
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/specter/d83a5c86-05aa-4bf6-8570-043116926596

## Job description

Company Background Specter's mission is to help automate the physical world. Today, we build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that answer any question, anywhere in their environments. Our systems can automatically detect and reason about any physical activity captured on camera, from security incidents (e.g. perimeter intrusion, theft, LPR), to safety monitoring (e.g. PPE detection, injured people), to operational efficiency (e.g. material tracking, congestion monitoring). We offer both long range wireless (1km range) and wired sensor variants to suit any deployment. Our co-founders Xerxes and Philip are passionate about empowering our partners in the fast approaching world of physical AI and robotics. We are a small, fast growing team who hail from Anduril, Tesla, Uber, and the U.S. Special Forces.

## The Role

We are looking for a Business Operations, Finance Lead to help build the financial and operational backbone of Specter. This person will be the primary owner of the company’s finance operations and will help translate the day-to-day motion of the business into clear, reliable operating systems. The role starts broad: finance ops, planning support, spend visibility, vendor coordination, and cross-functional operating cadence. Over time, it may evolve toward a finance, controller, or strategic finance leadership path as the company scales. The right person is highly organized, analytical, low-ego, and comfortable operating in the messy middle between accounting, finance, operations, and company-building. They should be able to get into the details, improve the system, and eventually build the foundation that future finance and accounting functions can stand on.

Responsibilities:

- You will help own the financial operating system of the company. This includes building reliable processes around spend, close, reporting, billing, vendor management, and financial hygiene.
- You will partner closely with company leadership on planning, forecasting, budgeting, cash visibility, and board/investor reporting support.
- You will create better visibility into how money moves through the business, including production spend, R&D spend, SaaS spend, vendor costs, and operating expenses.
- You will help build repeatable systems where today there may only be judgment, spreadsheets, Slack threads, and ad hoc decisions.
- You will work cross-functionally with engineering, supply chain, GTM, and leadership to make sure financial and operational data is accurate, timely, and decision-useful.
- You will take on ambiguous projects as they arise and help define what “good” looks like for a scaling operations function.

Qualifications:

- A strong operator who is detail-oriented enough to build reliable systems, but strategic enough to understand why those systems matter.
- Someone with finance, accounting, consulting, business operations, investing, startup operations, or similarly analytical experience.
- Comfort with spreadsheets, financial models, process design, and operating metrics.
- Excellent judgment, ownership, and follow-through.
- A low-ego team player who is willing to do the unglamorous work and improve it over time.
- Someone who can operate with limited structure and turn ambiguity into clarity.
- Interest in building the operating foundation of a fast-growing hardware and software company.

## About Specter

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Specter builds and deploys long-range wireless sensing networks with AI-powered real-time alerts and semantic search, creating the perception layer for the physical world.
- **Entity Type**: Private (funding stage not publicly disclosed)
- **Headquarters**: Not publicly available (likely US based on website language and job postings)
- **Founded**: Not publicly available
- **Founders**: Not publicly available

## Core Business
- Primary industries: Physical security, critical infrastructure monitoring, industrial IoT, real-time situational awareness
- Target customers: Enterprise and government – including energy companies, data centers, construction firms, ports, stadiums, industrial facilities, and campuses
- Mission statement: "Creating a Software Defined Physical World" – providing instant awareness through real-time alerts, semantic search, and a map-based view of every event

## Products & Services
- **Specter Platform**: A SaaS-based physical intelligence platform that ingests data from long-range wireless sensors (video, thermal, acoustic) and applies general AI (natural language alerts) to detect events such as unauthorized access, safety hazards, equipment anomalies, fires, spills, and perimeter breaches. Features include semantic search, live and historical event detection, and complete situational awareness dashboards.
- **Long-Range Wireless Sensing Network**: Proprietary hardware and software for rugged, wide-area coverage without trenching – deployed across refineries, deserts, offshore platforms, construction sites, and other harsh environments.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Annual revenue not publicly available; company is actively hiring (Software Engineer – Systems listing) and has a live product across multiple industry verticals.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly available
- **Growth Signals**: Recent website updates as of June 2026; expanding to new use cases (energy, data centers, construction, ports, stadiums); job openings indicate scaling engineering team.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Long-range wireless sensing** that eliminates blind spots without trenching or on-site personnel – a differentiator for remote and harsh environments.
- **General AI with natural language alerts** – users set and query alerts in plain English, lowering the barrier for security and operations teams.
- **Multimodal sensing** (video, thermal, acoustic) combined with real-time analytics for high-fidelity event detection (e.g., PPE compliance, spills, equipment theft, person-down incidents).
- Focus on **critical infrastructure** where downtime or security gaps carry high stakes, creating deep vertical-specific moats.

## Strategic Focus
- Expanding horizontal deployment across energy, data centers, construction, logistics, and campus security.
- Deepening AI capabilities through real-time semantic search and event detection to replace traditional CCTV monitoring.
- Building a “software-defined physical world” that unifies disparate sensors into a single intelligent layer.

## Why Work Here
- Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI + IoT systems that monitor real-world infrastructure at scale.
- Engineering culture likely emphasizes distributed systems, computer vision, edge computing, and high-reliability software (based on job description for Software Engineer – Systems).
- Fast-paced startup environment with a clear product-market fit across multiple verticals.
- Remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated; job posting does not specify location, but likely offers flexibility.

## Sources
1. [specter.co](https://specter.co/)
2. [specter.co/product](https://specter.co/product)
3. [specter.co/industries](https://specter.co/industries)
4. [specter.co/features](https://specter.co/features)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com - Software Engineer – Systems](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/specter/fe26a690-7934-46f4-bce2-8d8c5495a0dc)

## Other roles at Specter

- [Optics & Camera Engineering Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/optics-camera-engineering-lead-specter-san-francisco-021ech8bvbse) — San Francisco, CA
- [CV/ML Camera Test Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/cv-ml-camera-test-engineer-specter-san-francisco-xfz6n3t10vk8) — San Francisco, CA
- [Manufacturing Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/manufacturing-engineer-specter-san-francisco-g75553wbxwx6) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding Customer Operations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-customer-operations-lead-specter-san-francisco-4e0jb5pg08bh) — San Francisco, CA
- [Wireless Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/wireless-software-engineer-specter-san-francisco-zvjchm89fzv0) — San Francisco, CA
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