Head of Operations & Finance

About Cognee Cognee builds the memory engine and data plane for AI agents to plan, reason, and act. Our open-source Python and Rust SDK is in production at 500+ companies, runs 10 million times a month, and has hit GitHub Trending several times. We raised a $7.5m seed round from Pebblebed Ventures in San Francisco, founded by the founding engineers of OpenAI and the Facebook AI research lab. We are a team of around 25, with a US parent company and a German subsidiary in Berlin. Role Overview As Head of Operations & Finance (full-time, on-site in Berlin) you join Cognee's leadership team and lead finance, legal, compliance, grants, and people operations across our US and German entities. You report directly to the CEO. The role is hands-on. You manage our external advisors for tax, payroll, and legal. You set the priorities, develop the people who work with you, and stay close to the work: when it matters, you close the books, draft the contract, or build the automation yourself. The role also grows with the company. As Cognee scales, you will hire and lead a larger team across finance, legal, and people operations, and your own responsibility grows with it. What you'll do * + Finance and accounting. Run bookkeeping, monthly closing, annual accounts, payroll, and tax filings for the US Inc. and the German entity, together with our external accountants and tax advisors. + Build the billing engine. Automate invoicing, billing, and payment collection for customers, and manage vendor invoices and payment runs. + Planning and reporting. Own the financial model, budget, and cash planning, documented so that others can work with it. Prepare investor updates and board materials, and keep the data room ready for due diligence at any time. + Intercompany. Manage the agreements, transfer pricing, invoicing, and cash flows between the US and EU entities, and keep banking in order on both sides. + Grants. Lead applications, cost tracking, and reporting for public funding programs. + Automation and agents. Replace manual processes in finance, sales operations, and HR with automated workflows and AI agents, and help the rest of the team do the same. + Recruiting. Lead hiring end to end, from job ads, sourcing, and screening to offers, contracts, and onboarding. **Requirements** * Relevant experience. 2-4+ years in finance or operations at a venture-backed startup, or in venture capital or consulting. * Finance foundations. You can read and question a P&L and balance sheet, and you have built a financial model from scratch. * German basics. Working knowledge of German corporate, tax, and employment topics (UG/GmbH, HGB, payroll), ideally in a US-German group structure. * Appetite for automation. You work with AI agents and automation tools before you ask for more team resources. Python and SQL are a plus. * Clear communication. You explain financial and legal topics to people without that background, and you are confident in front of fo