Location: London, Oval (Hybrid 2 days per week from home)

Salary: £35,000–£45,000 + stock options + benefits

Contract: Full-time

*If your salary expectations do not meet our banding, please do still apply - salary banding is based on transferable skills, tenure, industry experience, and interview performance

👋 About The Role

Hi, I'm Anna, CFO at Zen Educate. We're scaling across the UK, and US, and our finance function is moving from "reporting what happened" to "shaping what happens next". We're hiring an Finance Analyst / Business Partner to help lead that shift.

This is not a role where you inherit a polished machine and keep it ticking. You'll help build it. You'll own core reporting, sit at the centre of our budget and reforecast cycles, and be the finance partner our Regional Directors call when they need an answer they can act on.

We're looking for someone with real rigour and a genuine itch for efficiency: the kind of person who automates a process once, removing manual steps to make room for strategic insight. If you are excited by a role with strategic, measurable impact whilst collaborating with a wide range of stakeholders, we'd love to meet you

🌍 What we’re building and why

Here’s the challenge: UK schools spend over £2 billion a year on temporary staff. But £600m of that goes straight into the pockets of recruitment agencies, money that should be going back into classrooms and teachers’ pay. So we’re doing things differently.

Zen Educate is an online platform that gives schools instant access to fully vetted teachers and support staff. Since launching in 2017, we’ve already saved schools over £30 million, that’s gone straight back to where it matters most. We've just closed a $37m Series B (the biggest EdTech round in Europe last year!), and we’re scaling fast in the UK and the US 🚀. We are incredibly proud to be a Certified B Corporation™! It’s an exciting time to join, have a huge impact, and grow alongside us.

🏗️ What this role looks like in practice

Reporting that people trust

Own a core set of weekly and monthly management reports end to end.

Take reports that are manual today and make them faster, more consistent and more automated each cycle.

Write the commentary, not just the numbers: explain what moved, why it moved and what we should do about it.

Planning and forecasting

Play a central role in our annual budget and termly reforecasts, which run on a school-year calendar across the UK and US.

Build and maintain driver-based models for revenue, headcount and costs, keeping them accurate, auditable and easy for others to use.

Run variance analysis (actual vs. budget vs. forecast) and turn it into clear, prioritised insight for leadership.

Business partnering and strategy

Act as a finance partner to our Regional Directors and commercial leads, joining monthly performance reviews and helping them understand the levers behind their numbers.

Lead analysis on unit economics, marketing return on investment, and regional performance.

Support investment and pricing decisions with clear cost-benefit analysis, including where the data is incomplete and judgement is required.

Systems, data and efficiency

Be the person who makes our finance stack work harder: Abacum, Xero, Hibob, Pleo and our BI tools.

Reconcile data across systems and fix problems at the source, not just in the spreadsheet.

Spot the next process to automate and build it, whether that's with formulas, scripts or AI tools.

Document how things work in Coda, so knowledge lives in the team rather than in one person's head.

🧠 What we're looking for

Traits that define success in this role

Commercial curiosity: You have a genuine interest in the core drivers of the business, and you want to understand why the numbers move.

Attention to detail: You notice when a number looks wrong, and you don't rest until you know why. People can rely on what you send them.

Analytical rigour: You structure problems before you solve them. You test your assumptions, and you can explain the logic behind every number in your model.