Meet the Finance Engineer

They know the accounting. Now they're writing the code.

At Rillet Recon this week, over 250 finance leaders walked into a ballroom in New York City and opened their laptops. They weren’t taking notes. They were building. The room wasn't watching a demo of what finance could look like someday. The people there were doing the work, live, as they talked.

This is what Rillet’s vibe coding sessions look like. Controllers are shipping automations between sessions. CFOs are connecting to their ERPs via MCP servers and running analyses in real time. People who'd never touched a terminal 90 days ago are running Claude Code as if it were their typical second screen. 

We've been watching this cohort form for months—in our weekly vibe coding sessions, in the conversations we have with customers, in the inbound LinkedIn messages from people who saw something from our community and wanted to know how to get started. 

What Recon 2026 confirmed is that AI use in accounting is real, it's accelerating, and it has a name. The Finance Engineer.

The gap between "I need this tool" and "I built this tool" just closed

Finance teams have always been close to data. Controllers sit at the intersection of every business system—billing, payroll, expenses, contracts—and spend their careers translating that data into numbers the business can trust. The technical instinct has always been there.

What's new? The gap. For years, the distance between "I need a tool that does X" and "I have a tool that does X" required a ticket to engineering, a backlog, a sprint, and six weeks of someone else's priorities. Some version of that story exists at every company out there. The finance team knew exactly what they needed, but they just couldn't build it on their own.

I have spent the past 10 weeks running live vibe coding sessions with controllers and CFOs, and hr watched that gap close week by week. 

"Anything that is rules-based and repeatable should be automatable," is something I told a group of 800 people on one of those calls. The revelation itself isn't the statement; it’s who's acting on it now.

What “Finance Engineer” actually means

A Finance Engineer treats their financial operations as a system to architect, not just a process to execute. That distinction matters. 

A finance leader using AI is still operating within the constraints of their software. They're working faster, but within the same walls. Using AI is not the bar. Every finance team uses AI now. The Finance Engineer is the one who looks at a broken workflow and decides to fix it permanently, with a build.

A Finance Engineer sees those constraints as a starting point. When the ERP doesn't talk to the billing system the way it should, they go build the connection. When a reconciliation process could be automated, but the vendor hasn't built it, they ship it themselves.

Brock Beyer, controller at Jump and a fixture in Rillet’s vibe coding sessions, studied accounting, earned his CPA, and, until a few months ago, had never written a line of production code. He has since built a hoteling desk software for his company entirely via vibe coding tools. Once deployed and live in production, that tool alone saved Jump $20,000 a year. 

"The first time you start doing these things, you do them in your spare time, because you're like, I don't know the value add," Brock commented. "And then you try it one or two times, see the use cases, see how good it is, and, all of a sudden, your day-to-day looks a lot different."

Alex Altman, Head of Finance at Coram AI, had never coded before he picked up Claude Code roughly 90 days before showing up to speak at one of our sessions. By the time he joined us, he had connected his ERP to Claude via MCP, built a live 13-week cash forecast pulling from accounts receivable and payable in real time, and gotten QuickBooks connected to Claude by having Cowork operate his browser and fill out the developer connection form. 

"Very much not an engineer, very much don't know what I'm doing," Alex said on the call, "but Claude does."

Friendly reminder that we’re not talking about software developers here. The Finance Engineer is still, at their core, an accountant. 

That's not a caveat, it's the whole point. The reason these builds hold up is that the people building them understand the accounting. They know what a journal entry needs to look like. They know what controls need to exist. They know when an automation that looks clean is producing something that would never survive an audit.

What they're building: Concrete examples

Builds vary based on what an individual and their team need. Some Finance Engineers are focused on data infrastructure. 

Samuel DeZube, Head of Strategic Finance at Workshop, built a full CPQ tool—connected to PandaDoc, with automatic proposal generation, multi-option deal structuring, and Slack-based DealDesk approval routing for out-of-policy discounts—using only Claude Cowork, no terminal required. He got there in about 10 back-and-forth prompts. 

"Taking the time up front to be really detailed, specific, and give as much context as possible," Samuel explained, "that's probably the most important thing I did in the entire process."

Zach Rial, Head of Finance at AskElephant, connected Claude to HubSpot via API, had it identify duplicate deals, propose merges, and execute them with human approval. Then, he turned the whole workflow into a reusable Claude Skill that gets smarter each time he runs it. 

Zach started by simply asking Claude how to do it: "It was like, I can do this. And then it was like, what if I proactively found the duplicates and came to you?"

‍Colin Schwendt, controller at CaptivateIQ, built a full event budgeting app in Lovable, connected it to the Ramp API to pull home cities and auto-calculate travel allowances per attendee, integrated GSA rates for hotel and per diem estimates, and wired the output to Ramp's virtual card system so pre-authorized budgets load directly onto employees' cards before the event. It's live, deployed to the company, and secured via magic-link authentication. 

Colin built it while also doing his actual job. "It's kind of a snowball," he observed. "Once you start going down, it just gets more fun."

‍Richard Atkins, Accounting Director at Crisp, built a vendor renewal management system complete with competitive landscape analysis, RFP scoring, and a build-versus-buy cost calculator that factors in engineering hours, security compliance, hosting, and audit risk. He started because his company mandated the team to find AI use cases, looked at his actual work calendar, and automated the thing sitting right in front of him. 

"I just went into Claude Code, and Claude walked me through the process,” said Richard.

The moment it clicks

What these builders have in common isn't a technical background. It's that they decided the bottlenecks they faced were a system problem, not a workload problem.

Brock put it plainly during one of our sessions: "As I have started to use more and more of these tools, my brain has been rewired. Like, every single day when you're working on something—look at it. If it's rule-based, if it's something that can be repeated, try to find a way to use Claude Code or one of these tools to start automating."

That mindset is what makes one a Finance Engineer. You don’t have to be someone who knows what a terminal is. Someone who looks at a manual process and sees a build. It may not be a formal job title on most org charts, but the role already exists in practice.

I originally coined this title for this role on one of the sessions, half-joking: Finance Engineer. The chat lit up. At Recon 2026, we saw it yet again, when the “Finance Engineer” laptop sticker was the most popular of the bunch.

Why Finance Engineers love Rillet

We built Rillet on a specific bet: finance teams deserve data that moves as fast as their business. Real-time architecture isn't a feature we added to a legacy ERP; it's the foundation we rebuilt on from scratch. Every reconciliation, every journal entry, and every report in Rillet reflects the state of your books right now.

That architecture is the foundation that makes the Finance Engineer's job possible. When Alex connects Claude to Rillet through MCP and builds a live 13-week cash forecast, the forecast works because the underlying data is actually current. When a fractional CFO uses Claude Code plus Rillet MCP to build opening balance sheet journal entries (a task that used to take half a day) completes in 10 minutes, it's because Rillet is powering that.

The Finance Engineer is not a forward-looking vision, but a person doing work today. Building things that their software vendors haven't shipped yet. Teaching themselves in the evening. Showing up to sessions like Recon with laptops open and something to demo.

What happened in that room this week was a cohort recognizing itself. We'll be here every Friday if you want to find us.

Rillet hosts weekly vibe coding sessions for finance leaders at rillet.com/vibes. Recordings from past sessions are available there as well.