Principal Accountant

eyeo has a complex, multi-entity legal structure spanning Germany and several other jurisdictions, built up through years of organic growth and acquisition. Over the past 18 months, our European Accounting team rebuilt the function from the ground up — a close process and controls where there used to be none. The close now runs in five days and the foundation is solid, though a significant multi-year external audit backlog still needs to be cleared. You have the technical depth and independent judgment to bring real value to a function like this, partnering with our Senior European Accounting Manager across European Accounting and Group Accounting so the team has real depth rather than a single point of failure:

• Have you ever picked up a multi-year, multi-jurisdiction audit backlog and turned it into a closed chapter? Join us and be the leading force, together with our Senior Accounting Manager, in clearing a significant external audit backlog dating back to 2022 — real remediation work, not steady-state PBC support, and a challenge that needs someone who can independently work through complex, aged technical questions.
• You deliver across the full audit and technical accounting domain. Whether it’s owning significant portions of the external audit process end-to-end — PBC preparation, auditor liaison, and resolution of technical accounting queries — or preparing technical accounting analyses under HGB and IFRS for audit and internal use, you feel comfortable solving the puzzle. And if you don’t know how, you are happy to dive right in and learn!
• You design and build consolidation capability that lasts. Your mind naturally maps out how entity hierarchies, intercompany elimination rules, chart-of-accounts and segment mappings, and currency translation setup connect, and you find satisfaction in double-teaming with our Group Senior Accountant to transition our consolidations from LucaNet to NetSuite — taking a co-leading role in standing up NetSuite consolidation from the ground up as a second consolidation capability.
• You review the full set of consolidated financial statements prepared monthly by our Group Senior Accountant under German GAAP (HGB) and IFRS, maintaining clear preparer/reviewer segregation of duties.
• Your curiosity is boundless, and you genuinely love untangling complex problems. You know how to leverage balance sheet reconciliation and variance analysis to understand our financial position, working with the rest of the accounting team to bring reconciliation up to date and maintain the rigor of the monthly close. You’ll produce our quarterly balance sheet briefing binder, covering variance analysis, balance sheet KPIs, and operational insights.
• Be at the forefront of finance automation. You’ll have the opportunity to contribute to our ongoing automation program — NetClose, NetCash, NetAsset, dunning automation, and AI-enabled flows — that increases output per person across Finance.
• You’re not content with just closing the books, you’re driven to see it make a tangible difference. You’re passionate about understanding the “why” behind our processes and controls — helping design, implement and improve end-to-end processes across R2R, H2R, P2P and O2C — and you gather input from affected stakeholders before rolling out changes, rather than mandating first and adjusting later.
• You bring 8+ years of progressive corporate accounting experience, including multi-entity, multi-currency consolidation (German or broader European accounting exposure strongly preferred), solid technical grounding in German GAAP (HGB) and IFRS group reporting, and a certification equivalent to the CPA in the U.S. Hands-on, in-depth LucaNet or NetSuite consolidation experience is preferred.

You bring others on the journey with you:

• You are a master of written communication — maintaining clear documentation and audit trails for ongoing compliance matters, and acting as a responsive, solution-oriented point of contact for Finance, Legal, People Ops, and business stakeholders, acknowledging requests quickly with a clear timeline and delivering on it.
• Your judgement and empathy — for both business partners and peers — mean that everyone wants to bring you into their projects. You take a consultative approach to explaining and applying accounting requirements: understanding a business partner’s operational context first, then tailoring how a rule gets implemented, without compromising on the control itself. You communicate all of this excellently in both German and English.
• This role isn’t about managing people — it’s about being a genuinely independent operator with a considerable scope of influence. Jean-Michel Buttier, who leads European Accounting and Group Consolidated Financials, currently owns accounting, tax, audit, and banking operations for the region on his own; our philosophy on freeing up that capacity is to bring in another genuinely experienced accountant who can pick up hard, ambiguous problems and run with them independently, with minimal supervision. You’ll take on real, independent ownership — not just support work — across group consolidation, statutory and technical reporting, audit remediation, and banking operations, working closely with Jean-Michel and in close collaboration with the wider team.
• You’re just as comfortable sharing what you know as you are owning problems yourself: you cross-train with the existing European Accounting team so expertise and institutional knowledge isn’t concentrated in any one person, and you work cross-regionally with the North America accounting team. This is a senior individual-contributor role, not a management layer, and not a “deputy” who waits to be handed pieces of someone else’s plate — eyeo runs a deliberately flat structure, and our philosophy on capacity is to hire genuinely experienced people who need little hand-holding and to lean on peer collaboration and cross-training rather than hierarchy.

Your solutions stand the test of time:

• You deliver solutions that are robust at every step of the process lifecycle — building a track record of establishing or improving processes and controls in a fast-growth environment with evolving systems and imperfect data.
• You remain committed to pragmatic, elegant simplicity — and not reinventing the wheel. That means acting as a strong day-to-day partner to eyeo’s external tax advisors on German trade tax, VAT, and wage tax matters, using your working knowledge of German tax compliance to help ensure accurate, on-time filings, rather than duplicating that expertise in-house.

Your solutions are demonstrably the best:

• You reason from first principles about what could be done to identify what should be done, why and how — including independently resolving multi-year audit backlogs or comparable remediation projects, not just steady-state audit support.
• You use data to isolate problems: balance sheet KPIs and variance analysis surface what needs attention. You use data to prioritize which problems should be tackled, and to confirm that the solutions you ship actually land as intended — because we measure success in this role the way we try to run all of Finance: fast, clear acknowledgment of requests instead of silence; processes designed with the people who’ll use them, not just handed down; and a team resilient enough, and cross-trained enough, that no single person is a bottleneck.

About eyeo

Building a Safer, Better Internet

Our mission is to make the 99% safe online.

Today, we are the world’s largest ad-blocking company. As such, we protect the sanity of hundreds of millions of people, mostly on desktop, by blocking nuisance elements online.

Guided by our leadership team’s vision, we’ve made it our mission to build the world’s largest cybersecurity company — one that protects more than a billion people. We’re expanding our protection across the five personal safes: safe sanity, safe privacy, safe hardware, safe money, and safe children (with fine-grained parental controls). Our goal is to protect every device, at all times — creating the personal firewall to rule all firewalls.

We believe that we can do this because we can sustainably monetize bringing safety to the 99% online.

Searching for Re-Founders

Borrowing a term from Reid Hoffman, we are “re-founding” eyeo. For a long time, life at eyeo was very predictable. Today, it is not. We are trying to do things that we have never done before, and our aspirations are sky high.

This means that we are not looking for tell-me-what-to-do employees. We are not looking for people who will happily accept being cogs in a machine. We are looking for leaders. We are looking for “re-founders”. We are looking for people who—through clarity of thought and tenacious force of will—can cut through the chaos and pull us to new heights.

Largely Remote, but Need Not Be

We have over 160 colleagues across the world. We work largely in remote teams spanning EST, BST and CET time zones. If working remotely isn’t for you, we also have our HQ in Berlin, and we have offices in Cologne and Toronto.

Equal Opportunity Statement 

At eyeo, we are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where every employee is empowered to thrive. We believe that the diversity of our backgrounds and experiences enhances our products and services, and we take pride in being a safe space for everyone. 

All qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment, regardless of race, color, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, physical ability, or duration of unemployment. We celebrate diversity and are dedicated to creating a workplace where everyone feels valued and respected.

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