Lead Financial Analyst, Strategic Business Partner – Product & Technology

Summary

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.

Why this role

• Be the trusted finance advisor to Product & Technology leadership, with a real voice in how we invest more than $100M in people, infrastructure, and partners.

• Work on infrastructure that serves more than 20 billion views per month.

• Drive projects with impact and executive visibility, including our CPTO and CFO.

• Shape the future of our business partner function by leading projects, setting standards, and mentoring other analysts.

• Join a collaborative, globally distributed team that values knowledge sharing.

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 on 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.

Deliver insight and reporting

• 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.

Lead, mentor, and strengthen the business partner function

• 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.

What you'll bring

Required

• 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.

Preferred

• 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.

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.

Travel Expectations:

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Frequency: 2–3 trips per year (international and domestic).

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Purpose: Annual department offsite, strategy alignment with Product & Tech (P&T) leadership, and global community conferences.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive donations from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

As an equal opportunity employer, the Wikimedia Foundation values having a diverse workforce and continuously strives to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to