About This Role

Dark Matter Labs works across five legal entities — in the Netherlands, UK, Canada, Sweden, and South Korea — each with distinct tax, compliance, and reporting requirements, alongside multiple funding structures and collaborative partnerships spanning continents. As our work grows in complexity, the strength of our financial foundations becomes increasingly critical — and those foundations need someone who genuinely cares about getting them right.

This role holds the financial backbone of the organisation. You will take end-to-end responsibility for bookkeeping and cost reporting, ensuring our records are accurate, transparent, and capable of supporting thoughtful decision-making. This means clean ledgers, clear cost visibility across missions and funding streams, and proactive stewardship of regulatory integrity.

This role works alongside Entity Holders, Group Accountant and the Project Finance & Systems Steward, who focuses on project-facing financial operations. Where that role supports individual projects and missions, this role holds the organisational and entity-level foundations that make all of that possible — the ledgers, the compliance, the cost structure, and the reporting architecture underneath.

This is not a senior strategic role — but it is an important one. The boring infrastructure, done well, is what makes meaningful work possible. We are looking for someone who understands that and finds genuine satisfaction in building it.

Focus Areas

You will hold full ownership of day-to-day bookkeeping across Dm’s European entities (UK, Netherlands, Sweden), ensuring our records are complete, structured and compliant. You will work with the Entity Holders and Group Accountant to achieve this. 

Responsibilities include:

• Maintaining accurate and timely general ledger records.

• Accounts payable and receivable management.

• Bank and balance sheet reconciliations.

• Intercompany transaction tracking and reconciliation across entities.

• Cash flow monitoring and documentation.

• Maintaining organised, compliant financial documentation.

• Supporting monthly and annual closing processes.

• Coordinating with external accountants

• Strengthening internal controls and documentation practices.

You will ensure our financial data is reliable, traceable and structurally coherent.

You will translate bookkeeping into organisational clarity. You will work with the project, mission and pathway development teams to achieve this.

Responsibilities include:

• Support cost tracking across missions, projects and funding streams.

• Prepare cost reporting information to submit to funders 

• Maintain budget vs. actual reporting at group and entity level, aggregated by cost centre, while providing project and mission holders with timely, suitably formatted cost data to enable them to monitor variances and manage their own budgets effectively. Developing and refining cost allocation methodologies.

• Monitoring and flagging material variances.

• Supporting grant and restricted funding reporting.

• Improving reporting processes to reflect organisational reality.

This work ensures that financial information meaningfully informs strategic and operational decisions.

Dark Matter Labs operates across multiple jurisdictions internationally. This role supports regulatory integrity — ensuring that compliance is proactive, coordinated and well-documented.

Responsibilities include:

• Maintaining working awareness of tax and financial regulatory requirements across the jurisdictions in which Dm operates (largely VAT requirements). You are not expected to act as a legal authority. Rather, you will steward our data to ensure it is up to date and compliant.

• Support and work alongside Entity Holders and Group Accountant to make sure Dm meets its tax and regulatory requirements

• Proactively identifying, flagging, and reporting financial and tax compliance risks to the relevant team members. 

• Liaising with internal finance colleagues 

• Ensuring documentation supports regulatory and audit standards where applicable.

Your Background

We are less concerned with linear finance career pathways and more interested in your ability to steward financial clarity in complex environments.

• Demonstrated experience in bookkeeping or financial record management.

• Experience contributing to cost reporting or budget tracking.

• Working familiarity with tax frameworks across multiple jurisdictions, including VAT, in practice.

• Experience working in multi-entity or cross-border contexts, or comparable complexity.

• Strong structural attention to detail.

• Ability to communicate financial information clearly to non-financial colleagues.

• Comfort working in evolving, distributed environments.

We do not expect you to hold all expertise alone — but we do expect you to take ownership, ask thoughtful questions, and know when to seek specialist input.

• Experience in mission-driven, non-profit or hybrid organisations.

• Familiarity with grant reporting and restricted funding.

• Experience improving financial systems or reporting architecture.

• Exposure to participatory or non-hierarchical governance contexts.

• Formal accounting qualification or accreditation.

• Experience preparing for audits.

Who You Might Work Closely With

Alizé De Buck — Entity Holder, Dm UK & Dm Sweden: Alizé holds Dm’s financial and operational processes and structures, bringing a background in Politics, Sociology, and Philosophy of the Social Sciences alongside hands-on experience overseeing operations and finances at a leading international interior design practice.

Andrea Fernandes — Group Accountant: A Chartered Accountant and Fellow of the ICAEW, Andrea trained with Deloitte before working with listed groups including De La Rue Plc and Estée Lauder Companies, and now focuses on using financial information to support Dm’s growth and development.

Jason Brown — Jason stewards the direction and ongoing evolution of the Project Journey Circle, shaping the tools, information architecture, and technical infrastructure that enable coherent data flows, discovery-driven work, and coordination across projects, mission, circles, and entities.

Rob de Jong — Entity Co-holder, Dm Netherlands: Rob is responsible for the hard operations and governance of Dm Netherlands, bringing experience in project, programme, and service management across industry and local government, alongside degrees from Cambridge, the University of London, and Geneva.

Carolina Ribeiro — People & Finance Co-holder: Carolina co-holds People and Finance Processes at Dm, with a background in social start-ups across FinTech, food, and participatory arts and a passion for analysing power dynamics and making them accessible to all.

• Mission and project stewards.

• Entity operations and governance colleagues.

• External tax and legal advisors.

• Cost reporting auditors and grant funders.

Pay

Our approach to pay has always been a participatory and collective process involving the entire team. Over time, we’ve experimented with different models, and we’ve recently launched our new Base Pay Formula, which is composed of the following elements:

• Geographic living costs

• Starting assets each individual brings into their Dm role upon joining. For this role, we recognise two types:

  • Must-have: Applied technical skills focused on supporting human thriving through embodied leadership

  • Nice-to-have: Professional standard accreditations

• Tenure at Dm

You can estimate your pay using this calculator.

We recognize that no formula can fully reflect the unique context of every individual. That’s why we also have a Pay Rebalancing process in place, reviewed annually, to accommodate individual circumstances.

In addition, we offer Shared Benefits and Leave Budgets, which are added to the gross salary. These were set collectively by the team and vary based on statutory provisions in different geographies. We’ll be happy to confirm the specific approach relevant to your location and contract type.

Our holiday policy includes a minimum of 28 days per year (pro-rata), but we encourage you to take as much time as you need to truly rest and recharge.

Your Hiring Journey at Dark Matter Labs

This page outlines how the process will look if you apply. We recommend checking it, and if you have any questions, please reach out at join@darkmatterlabs.org.

For this role, we do not require a CV, as we aim to focus more on your potential than your past experience. In saying that, we are confident this isn’t an entry level role. Instead, you will be asked to answer four sift questions (250 words max each) related to the role, which will hopefully also help you determine if this role truly interests you. We expect to hold three rounds of interviews for this role with the first round commencing September 8th.

Applications will be reviewed and called for interviews on a rolling basis. We are expecting a high number of applications, therefore the sooner you apply the better.

Thank you for your time and energy!