Chief Financial Officer

Own the numbers that carry Mickai through its seed round and into diligence.

About Mickai:

Mickai is a UK deep-tech company and MICKAI® is a Sovereign Intelligence Operating System (SIOS), AI that regulated organisations own and run inside their own walls, offline, on hardware they control. This is not an average pre-seed company. The product is built and live, an operational MVP running today, not a slide or a prototype. It carries 50 specialised brains and more than 60 studios that replace the enterprise cloud stack, from SAP and Oracle to Salesforce, Workday and CrowdStrike, all running offline. Every consequential action is sealed into the Open Audit Record, a post-quantum signed ledger verifiable offline for years. A self-validating harness passes over a thousand checks on the operator's own machine. The estate stands at 104 filed UK patent applications and 2,340 claims. Three live commercial surfaces already sit around the SIOS, Mickai Studio, Mickai Bot and Mickai Audit, with early clients lined up. The engineering is real. The finances now need to match it.

The role:

You own the financial spine of a deep-tech company. You build and defend the model that ties recurring revenue and patent licensing to a credible path, run budgeting that keeps a small technical team focused, and prepare investor reporting that stands up to diligence.

What you will own:

• The financial model tying recurring revenue and licensing forecasts to a defensible plan
• Fundraising support, from data room preparation to answering investor and diligence questions
• Budgeting and cash runway, giving the founder a clear view of burn and headroom
• Investor-ready reporting and board materials that hold up under scrutiny
• How the patent estate and licensing pipeline are represented in the numbers
• Clean, consistent and audit-ready books, cap table and forecasts
• Pricing, unit economics and revenue scenarios across defence, financial services and government
• The finance operating rhythm and the controls a scaling company will need

What you bring:

• Finance leadership experience in a startup or deep-tech company, ideally through a seed round
• Fluency in financial modelling, from revenue build to scenario and sensitivity analysis
• A track record of preparing companies for investor diligence and keeping the numbers credible
• Command of budgeting, cash management and runway planning for an early-stage business
• The rigour to keep books, forecasts and cap table clean and consistent
• Clear, plain communication of financial reality to founders, boards and investors
• Sound judgement on what is defensible and what is hype, and the discipline to never overstate

Nice to have:

• Experience with IP or patent licensing revenue models
• Exposure to fundraising in regulated sectors such as defence, financial services or government
• Familiarity with UK grant funding and R and D tax relief
• Prior CFO or Head of Finance ownership through an early institutional round

The deal (please read):

This is a founding, part-time role. It carries meaningful sweat equity now and converts to a competitive salary once we close our seed round. It is remote only and open only to applicants based in the United Kingdom or the United Arab Emirates, for legal and compliance reasons, with UK-friendly overlap appreciated.

Why join now:

The product is built and live, the patent estate is filed, and the category is still being defined. You join to make the finances match the engineering and to carry the numbers through the seed round while the story is still being written.

Required with your application:

Please include a link to your LinkedIn profile. Applications without a LinkedIn profile URL will not be reviewed.

How to apply:

Apply here, or email the team at hello@mickai.co.uk with a short note and anything that shows your work. Tell us what you would build in your first month. We move fast and we reply. Mickai builds its team on merit and mission, and welcomes applicants from every background.