Executive Director, Strategic Finance

Overview

Job Description

Responsibilities

• - Take ownership of the board meeting preparation process, proactively creating proposed structures and content, and building a meaningful first draft of the board deck.
• - Engage in iterative coordination and refinement directly with the CFO to ensure alignment with expectations and strategic objectives.
• - Own, write, build, and coordinate the creation of a public-company quality investor update, ensuring clear and compelling communication of financial and strategic developments to investors and stakeholders.
• - Conduct in-depth competitor earnings analysis to identify trends, patterns, and key insights, providing strategic recommendations to enhance our competitive position and drive growth.
• - Oversee the creation of reporting packages in support of providing business partners, with timely and insightful summaries, dashboards, and KPIs of financial results.
• - Provide leadership and support for a 3-year business plan, incorporating the financial impacts of company strategies and initiatives to develop models to project, evaluate, and quantify scenario planning, investment analysis, and operational variables assessment.
• - Maintain an insights-driven, high-performing finance organization to create sustainable value and support the strategic priorities of Automattic.
• - Establish solid working relationships with other leaders in Finance and the business to facilitate effective best practices, process efficiency, and sharing across the company''s matrix organization.

Required Skills

• - Business acumen, strategic agility, and operational intuition to go beyond the numbers in dissecting and analyzing business issues, challenges, and opportunities.
• - Experience in building and writing board-level presentations and public-company-quality quarterly shareholder updates/letters, showcasing strong communication skills and the ability to convey complex financial and strategic information effectively.
• - Experience as a financial and operations leader with demonstrated financial discipline and success in a high-growth, rapidly changing environment.
• - Public company experience, preferably IPO, ideally coupled with small/high-growth company familiarity (or experience rotating through various finance roles within a company).
• - Strong analytical skills with business acumen and the ability to transition between the strategic and the detailed (expert Excel abilities).
• - Experience with scale and global complexity, as well as experience supporting growth through new business models and adjacent revenue streams.
• - Recent experience in the Software/SaaS and/or B2C preferred and an understanding of how to forecast and monitor different types of revenue and costs.
• - Self-starter and ability to take complete ownership of their areas of responsibility.
• - Advanced skills in communication and leadership through influence and data-driven decision-making.
• - Adopts a broad, long-term perspective on the business, including customer segments and the external environment.
• - Develops hypotheses or alternative scenarios of how critical issues will play out beyond the year, and uses these to set challenging goals with future payoffs or outcomes.
• - Cultural fit is critically important and includes trust, professionalism, collaboration, and a bias for action.