Executive Director, Strategic Finance

Summary

Join Automattic, a global leader in publishing, messaging, and commerce software, as a strategic leader responsible for communicating key business insights to the Board, creating investor relations content, managing strategic projects, and overseeing CFO responsibilities for incubator businesses. This highly visible role involves partnering with the CFO, CEO, and business unit GMs, and directly communicating with the Board. You will actively participate in M&A and corporate development, contributing to the company's inorganic growth. The role offers an internal career path to a business unit CFO position. Automattic is a fully distributed company, offering flexibility and remote work opportunities. The salary range is $120,000-$200,000 USD.

Requirements

• 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
• 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

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. Highlight results to the leadership team and provide recommended action steps
• 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

Preferred Qualifications

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

Benefits

• Salary range: $120,000-$200,000 USD - Please note that salary ranges are global, regardless of location, and we pay in local currency
• Remote work