Full time, permanent. £48,000 to £60,000 depending on experience. Reports to the CFO.

Meridian is a Cambridge-based Community Interest Company working on AI safety, AI governance, and biosecurity. We act as the legal and financial home for multiple complex funded projects through fiscal sponsorship, and our activity has grown roughly tenfold in the last eighteen months.

The role in summary

Own the routine. Prepare the complex. Escalate the exceptional.

You will take ownership of the day-to-day finance operation so that it runs without the CFO being involved at every step, keep our systems and records in good order, and act as a second pair of eyes across finance and governance. The test we will use: if the CFO is away for two weeks, all normal finance and governance activity continues.

This is a hands-on role for someone moving up into broader ownership, not a senior finance or strategy position. It is also deliberately a stepping-stone: you will get breadth that is hard to find in a larger finance team, and we will support your progression, including study support if you are working towards a qualification.

What you’ll do

Finance operations (the bulk of the week)

• Process staff expenses and reimbursements, checking claims are reasonable and supported.

• Own routine invoice processing and payments within an agreed delegated authority.

• Spot unusual payments or expenses and bring in the CFO where judgement is needed.

• Run the finance inbox and resolve straightforward queries.

• Help keep Xero up to date and reconciled, with bank reconciliations current.

• Download and work with transaction data from Wise and other systems, and keep trackers and spreadsheets accurate.

• Prepare payroll information.

• Prepare information for month-end and year-end, and make sure recurring processes happen on time without being prompted.

Budgets and financial information

• Pull transaction data into project budgets and the cashflow.

• Help project leads, most of whom are researchers rather than finance people, understand where they stand in plain language.

• Highlight anything abnormal and raise it early.

Governance and compliance

• Work with the team to maintain and build a strong governance and compliance framework.

• Notice when something needs attention (a policy overdue for review, a possible VAT or customs question on imported equipment), investigate enough to understand it, and either resolve it or make sure somebody owns it.

Systems and process improvement

• Build and improve repeatable finance processes, trackers and controls.

• Find manual work that can sensibly be simplified or automated.

• Document recurring processes so they do not depend on one person's memory.

Expenses, payments, payroll and reconciliations sit within clear financial controls: dual authorisation above an agreed threshold, and reconciliations reviewed by someone other than the preparer. These protect you as much as the organisation, and leave plenty of room to work independently.

What we’re looking for

In roughly this order:

• Judgement and common sense. If something is normal, you get on with it. If something looks unusual, you notice. If you can resolve it, you do. If the CFO needs to be involved, you bring them in.

• Detail orientation. You care about accuracy. Numbers that do not reconcile, missing documentation, strange transactions and processes that have quietly stopped working are signals to investigate, not things to ignore.

• Ownership. You want responsibility rather than a task list every morning, and you follow things through so nothing gets lost between people.

• Comfortable with the detail. Expenses, invoices, data entry, reconciliations, spreadsheets, payroll and document management are the job, alongside the ambition to improve how they are done.
  

We are keeping the professional background deliberately broad. You might be an experienced bookkeeper looking for much more ownership, a part-qualified accountant, a finance assistant or officer ready for a larger role, or someone qualified by experience running finance in a smaller organisation. A formal accounting qualification is not essential.

Essential

• Experience working with budgets.

• Strong spreadsheet skills, and comfort handling and manipulating financial data.

• Understanding of bookkeeping and basic accounting principles, including what a journal is and why it is being posted.

• Very strong attention to detail, good judgement and common sense.

• Reliable, and able to manage recurring deadlines.

• Comfortable learning new systems.

• Able to work independently and know when to escalate.

• Interested in building better systems rather than only following existing ones.

Desirable

• Xero experience.

• Experience processing expenses and invoices, running payroll, or preparing for month-end.

• Experience in a charity, CIC, non-profit, research organisation or other project-based environment.

• Grant or restricted-fund accounting exposure.

• Governance or compliance administration experience.

• Airtable, Zapier or similar systems experience.

• Interest in AI safety, biosecurity, or using your career to work on high-impact problems.

Additional Details

• Salary:  £48,000 to £60,000

• Contract Type: Full time (1.0 FTE), permanent

• Location: Cambridge, UK, office-based

• Reports to the CFO

• Visa support is available

• Unlimited PTO

• 4% Pension contribution

• Lunches and snacks provided

• Access to all Meridian events and the wider research community

• Start date: As soon as possible