Welcome to The Finance Engineer

Something is shifting in finance.

Your title still says CFO. Or VP of Finance. Or Controller. Or FP&A. Maybe founder.

But the work changed. You’re building agents. Automating the close. Vibe-coding a dashboard at 11pm. Connecting Claude to your live data and watching it answer in ten seconds what used to take your team a week.

Somewhere in there, you started feeling more like an engineer. You just never said it out loud.

There’s a name for it now. The Finance Engineer.

It’s what I call myself. It’s what a lot of my finance friends call themselves. It’s probably what you already are.

A quick story about that name

When I first saw the title, I laughed. Because 13 years ago I spent a whole year studying financial engineering — quant stuff, pricing exotic derivatives in Python, Monte Carlo, stochastic calculus. A course so hard my corporate finance professor told me “even I didn’t finish it.” I finished it. Got the certificate. Never used it once.

Finance engineer, 2026: someone on a normal FP&A team who automates the close, builds dashboards, and ships AI agents with Claude. No quant degree. Just curiosity and a Claude subscription.

13 years ago I trained for a version of this I mostly never used. The new version showed up on its own. And this time, it’s the whole job.

So what is The Finance Engineer?

A weekly newsletter, written by me, to help you build the AI skill stack and the mindset of a Finance Engineer for a new era of finance.

The person on the other end

I’m Alyona. Over a decade in finance, in nearly every seat there is. I started at PwC. I became a CFO. I launched a fintech startup. Now I’m founder and CEO of Fuelfinance, an AI-native FP&A platform, which makes me a founder and a CFO at the same time.

Now I spend my evenings testing AI agents and vibe-coding tools, trying to find what actually works for finance teams. Some of it works. Some of it breaks in ways that would scare you.

You you could have seen me somewhere on LinkedIn as I’ve grown to 40K of you there. My guides on AI in finance have been downloaded by more than 10K finance leaders - maybe it’s you. Let me know in chat if that’s you!

Off the clock: a cross-continental swimmer, a runner, and a dog mom to a husky named Haku, who you’ll probably meet in these pages.

I’m working this out in real time, same as you. I test a lot. I build a lot. I share all of it here.

What you’ll spend 10 minutes on, every week

• My step-by-step tutorials. Exactly how I do things with Claude, agents, and the rest. Pro subscribers get the Loom walkthroughs and the deeper steps, but there’s a lot of value in the free version too.

• Builds from other finance engineers. Reads and tutorials from people doing this even better than me.

• Notes from the founder seat. I read a lot about the AI space in general, so I’ll share that in between the tutorials.

Launching soon:

• A weekly Finance Engineer job board. The best AI-native finance roles, hand-picked. (Vendors with a great job to list for this community, reach out. Great jobs only.)

• Interviews with Finance Engineers. If you are one and want to share what you built, get in touch.

• A private community.

• Surveys and reports.

If any of this sounds like you, subscribe.

You’re not behind. You’re still early.

Talk soon,

Alyona