Lead Financial Analyst, Strategic Business Partner - Product & Technology

The Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a Lead Financial Analyst to serve as a strategic finance partner to its Product & Technology department and another department. The role leads financial planning, forecasting, analysis, and investment decision support while strengthening the business partner function through mentoring and process improvements.

Responsibilities:

• Act as the lead finance partner to department leaders and budget owners, providing analysis that informs prioritization and investment trade-offs
• Join planning and roadmap conversations early as the voice of finance, raising tradeoffs and risks before commitments are made
• Provide the financial voice in business strategy across our technical infrastructure and product development objectives
• Translate roadmaps from teams like SRE, AI/ML, and Data Engineering into budgets, forecasts, and headcount and contractor plans
• Lead annual budgeting, quarterly reforecasting, and multi-year planning for your departments
• Facilitate on vendor spend optimization across cloud, hosting, software, and contractor support
• Lead data center and infrastructure CAPEX planning, including capacity, hardware refresh, and depreciation impacts
• Partner with Accounting on software capitalization, including project classification and capitalizable labor and contractor costs
• Model total cost of ownership and build-versus-buy decisions, and communicate their financial impact clearly to non-finance leaders
• Lead month-end close, forecasting, and variance analysis, with clear commentary on drivers, risks, and opportunities
• Present resource plans and financial performance to senior leaders, including our CPTO and CFO
• Build and maintain dashboards that connect spend to technical and product outcomes
• Coach and mentor FP&A analysts on modeling, analysis, and stakeholder partnership, including reviewing their work and helping them build executive-ready communication
• Help set the standard for what good financial business partnership looks like, and share best practices across the team
• Lead projects that improve the function, from scoping through roll-out, including streamlining multi-year financial modeling, departmental reporting, and business insights
• Help manage our financial planning and reporting system, including documentation, process improvements, and new module roll-outs

Requirements:

• Bachelor‘s degree plus 7+ years of experience in FP&A, financial business partnering, or corporate finance, including experience supporting a technology, engineering, or product organization
• Experience partnering with technical and product teams, and the curiosity to learn how they work
• Experience working at a strategic level on business and organizational-wide goals
• Strong financial modeling and analytical skills, and excellent written and verbal communication, including presenting to executives
• A track record of building credibility with senior stakeholders and influencing without authority
• Experience supporting multiple divisions or business units at once, mentoring or coaching other analysts, and leading process improvement projects
• Tech-specific planning experience, such as data center or infrastructure CAPEX, software capitalization (ASC 350-40), headcount planning, and contractor or vendor spend
• Experience with Workday Adaptive Planning
• Finance business intelligence and reporting experience
• Experience in a nonprofit, open-source, or mission-driven organization
• An understanding of the free culture, free software, or online rights movements
• MBA or CPA