Overview

The Finance Director for an Automattic Business Segment is a highly visible role that includes frequent interaction with C-level leaders, business and operational executives, and other key internal and external stakeholders. As a leader within the Finance team, this role’s overarching charter includes FP&A business support in delivering relevant and insightful analysis that enables effective decision-making.

This role has responsibility for developing a comprehensive understanding of all key business drivers and sophisticated financial models which will enable you and your team to deliver insightful, value-added analysis. The ability to meld operational and financial measurement and analytics is paramount.

The Director will work across businesses, to ensure the finance function supports and facilitates growth and works collaboratively with the entire executive team to set strategic direction and drive enterprise success.

We will expect this position to drive significant improvements in processes, systems, and metrics/reporting, with the goal to provide transparency and insight to a complex, growing company.

She or he will be heavily engaged in ad hoc analytical and decision-making support including potential partnerships, acquisitions and growth initiatives, marketing analysis, pricing, key investments in LTV, SAC, and other KPI’s relevant to Automattic.

The Director of FP&A will help to drive, build, and scale the company’s finance organization. You will play a key role in recruiting, developing, and retaining our employee base. You’ll be a catalyst to ensure a positive, learning-based environment conducive to teamwork and problem-solving.

This position is an exceptional opportunity to join a dynamic, fast-growing company with an iconic brand and unlimited growth potential. We encourage you to seriously consider Automattic as the next step in your career progression!

Additional Responsibilities

  • Oversee the creation of reporting packages, in support of providing business partners with timely and insightful summaries, dashboards, and KPI’s of financial results. Highlight results to the leadership team and provide recommended action steps. Prepare financial presentations for the monthly and quarterly board/sponsor update meetings
  • Ownership of an annual budget and 12-month rolling forecast of the P/L, B/S and CF. Organize/conduct management reviews on a regular cadence to drive decisions and actions.
  • Provide leadership and support for a 3 yr 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.
  • Assist in overall business intelligence and data architecture of the company. Focus and oversight of data and systems for scalable and repeatable measurement and analytics.
  • Analyze and extract insights from complex data sets and communicate insights and provide suggestions for action and improvement.
  • Provide support and analysis on potential partnerships, acquisitions and growth initiatives, including standard financial models and metrics for financial analysis and assessment.
  • Serve as a champion for cost management and waste reduction across the company by leading the development, monitoring, and reporting of key operational metrics and driving processes to improve productivity and efficiency within the businesses and functions.
  • Build, lead, and 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 practice, process efficiency and sharing across the company’s matrix organization.
  • Lead and direct work to maintain an effective environment of internal financial controls within the Finance and Accounting organizations.

Candidate Profile:

The ideal candidate is an experienced and analytical professional who thrives on building companies and thrives in a fast-paced, evolving environment. This is a pivotal role and a key strategic partner to the executive teams across Automattic. It is critical that this person has spent time in large, complex organizations, is comfortable in a highly visible role, and capable and willing to roll up his/her sleeves and operate at a detailed financial level.

From a style perspective, the successful candidate will be a change agent and a highly process-oriented individual who can drive change at scale. Cultural fit is critically important and includes trust, professionalism, collaboration, and a bias for action. Demonstrated ability to adjust and adapt. Able to work well under pressure while dealing with multiple competing priorities. Strong work ethic and passion for his/her work.

Required Qualifications: 

  • Experience as a corporate or business-unit financial operations leader with demonstrated financial discipline and success in a high-growth, rapidly changing environment.
  • Public company experience 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).
  • Proven ability to lead and motivate teams: achieving organizational focus on key priorities, providing clear direction, delegating, actively communicating and coaching/mentoring.
  • 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.
  • Strong business and operational orientation and demonstrated track record of close partnership with the senior leaders, strategy, and influencing business decisions.

To increase your chances of standing out, please address one or all of following in your application:

  • What’s your favorite SaaS metric for a business like WordPress.com? Why?
  • Tell us about an interesting analysis problem you’ve worked on. What made it interesting?

ABOUT AUTOMATTIC

We are the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Tumblr, and more. We believe in making the web a better place.

We’re a distributed company with more than 1100 Automatticians in 65+ countries speaking 75+ different languages. Our common goal is to democratize publishing so that anyone with a story can tell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or where they live in the world.

DIVERSITY & INCLUSION AT AUTOMATTIC

We’re improving diversity in the tech industry. At Automattic, we want people to love their work and show respect and empathy to all. We welcome differences and strive to increase participation from traditionally underrepresented groups. Our D&I committee involves Automatticians across the company and drives grassroots change. For example, this group has helped facilitate private online spaces for affiliated Automatticians to gather and helps run a monthly D&I People Lab series for further learning. Diversity and Inclusion is a priority at Automattic, though our dedication influences far more than just Automatticians: We make our products freely available and translate our products into and offer customer support in numerous languages. We require unconscious bias training for our hiring teams and ensure our products are accessible across different bandwidths and devices. Read more about our dedication to diversity and inclusion.

HOW TO APPLY

If you’d like to apply, fill out our application form below.

We are lucky to receive many applications, so try to make your application stand out.

Proofread! Make sure you spell and capitalize WordPress and Automattic correctly. We are lucky to receive hundreds of applications for every position, so try to make your application stand out. If you apply for multiple positions or send multiple emails there will be one reply.