[Hiring] Lead Financial Analyst @Wikimedia Foundation

Role Description

Join the Foundation in our ambitious project to empower people to create and share the sum of all human knowledge. We are looking for a Lead Financial Analyst to serve as the strategic business partner to our Product & Technology department, one of the most dynamic and fastest-growing parts of the organization, with a combined budget of more than $100M. You will also support other key areas of our work and, as the most senior analyst on the Financial Business Partner team, be responsible for driving improvements in financial planning, analytics, and our business partnership practices.

This is a business partnering role first and an FP&A role second. You will sit alongside product and engineering leaders, help them weigh investment tradeoffs before decisions are made, and turn roadmaps into financial plans. You will work directly with the Chief of Product and Technology (CPTO), the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), and the broader executive team. This is a chance to have an outsized impact on a mission-driven organization that operates one of the most visited websites in the world.

This role is remote and open to candidates between UTC-8 and UTC+1.

Qualifications

• 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. MBA or CPA preferred.
• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• Competitive and equitable salaries based on skills, experience, and location.
• Anticipated annual pay range for applicants in the U.S. is US$110,000 to US$181,000.
• Remote-first organization with staff members in 40+ countries.
• Travel expectations: 2–3 trips per year for annual department offsite, strategy alignment, and global community conferences.

What you'll do

• Be the Finance Partner to Product & Technology, and a second department.
• 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 vendor spend optimization across cloud, hosting, software, and contractor support.
• Plan for capital and technical accounting.
• 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.

Qualities that are important to us

• You love solving problems and understand the connections between micro decisions and the macro systems.
• You love deeply understanding business drivers and finding ways we can deploy resources for greater impact.
• You believe in the mission and enjoy collaborating with a wide range of stakeholders.
• You work well with distributed teams, both asynchronously and synchronously.
• You are proactive, comfortable with ambiguity, and adaptable in a fast-changing environment.
• You look for ways to simplify and standardize, and you can bring others along.
• You are a thoughtful mentor who enjoys raising the capability of those around you.

What Success Looks Like

• Product & Technology leaders involve you early and treat you as a thought partner, not a scorekeeper.
• Investment proposals arrive with clear, well-supported financial cases.
• Budgets and forecasts reflect the real roadmap, and variance commentary explains the why.
• FP&A analysts on the team are growing in skill and confidence through your coaching.
• The business partner function has stronger standards, tools, and processes than it did before you joined.