As a primary architect of our financial systems, you will bridge the gap between sophisticated technical design and global business strategy to build a leading-edge digital ecosystem. This role offers the unique challenge of designing our next phase of automation, analytics, and AI in our business processes.
This is a high-impact opportunity to lead the evolution of our finance tech stack, ensuring our data and infrastructure empower the Wikimedia Foundation’s operations so that we can meet our vision of helping every human being freely share in the sum of all knowledge.
You are responsible for:
- Shaping, evolving, and championing the core finance systems strategy to improve accounting and finance operational workflows and promote automation.
- Developing and own a strategic 3-year finance system transformation roadmap that prioritizes initiatives based on business impact, feasibility, resource constraints, and evaluation criteria that measure the effectiveness of transformation initiatives against long-term Foundation goals.
- Driving end-to-end digital transformation of our workflows in collaboration with the business analysis, project management, IT Services teams, and subject matter experts.
- Leading cross-functional system transformation initiatives, serving as both strategist and hands-on project leader.
- Serving as the overall finance systems product owner, driving continuous improvement, proactively identifying inefficiencies, reducing manual work, and enhancing data accuracy and audit readiness.
- Proactively managing risks associated with ERP architecture and data integrity, ensuring that system evolutions do not disrupt business-critical financial activities or audit objectives.
- Driving collaborative decision-making and governance with senior leaders in IT, HR, Fundraising, and Security to execute system-related policies and internal controls, ensuring organization-wide compliance across global finance operations.
- Navigating complex, sensitive organizational shifts by influencing senior leadership and cross-functional stakeholders to adopt new technologies and process changes.
- Defining and owning adoption and success metrics for financial systems.
- Managing the budget and drive cost efficiency of our ERP systems.
- Acting as finance automation & AI lead for our financial workflows, identifying automation targets, improved analytics, and designing agentic workflows.
- Effectively leading a small ERP systems team of 2 direct reports who are responsible for managing multiple work streams and functional areas with dotted lines to other teams. Ensuring the team meets goals, drives improvement, and develops professionally.
Skills and Experience:
Leadership and Collaboration
- 10+ years of progressive experience in finance transformation, ERP implementation, and systems improvement.
- Strong understanding of accounting and finance concepts; US GAAP principles; record-to-report, procure-to-pay, and other financial cycles.
- Ability to work effectively in a highly integrated working model, partnering deeply with other teams and subject matter experts to design solutions where boundaries overlap.
- Ability to lead workshops, including gathering and documenting business needs and use cases, and recommending envisioned processes.
- Experience delivering major transformation initiatives in waterfall and agile environments.
- Proven track record in managing cross-functional systems teams.
- Experience defining roadmaps, prioritizing backlogs, and delivering complex, multi-system changes.
- Able to communicate technical decisions in plain language to senior leadership and cross-functional audiences
- Skilled at working in a global, distributed, remote-friendly environment.
Technical and Architectural
- Direct experience designing and governing multi-tenant cloud enterprise architectures, including management of asynchronous data flows, API rates, and schema evolution between SaaS systems and data warehousing.
- Hands-on experience designing and implementing data pipelines to consolidate disparate data in end-to-end financial workflows.
- Deep understanding of finance processes and ERP systems (Sage Intacct, Coupa, Navan or similar).
- Understanding of non-profit data environments would be a plus.
- Experience defining integration strategy using knowledge of integration patterns and technologies (JSON/XML, REST/SOAP, webhooks), identity, and security controls.
- Knowledge of audit and compliance frameworks and the ability to map these to system configurations.
- Experience designing and implementing cloud data lake or data warehouse solutions in multi-tenant environments is a plus.
Qualities that are important to us:
- You enjoy collaborating with a range of stakeholders and value knowledge sharing.
- You love solving problems and understand the connections between micro-decisions and macro systems.
- You love using data and metrics to measure performance and to tell a story.
- You believe in the mission of the Foundation and are excited to refine tools, systems, ways of working to support that mission.
- You are comfortable with ambiguity and are able to adapt to a rapidly changing business environment.
- You thrive in a results-oriented culture that favors collaborative decision making.
- You are a flexible and creative individual capable of managing multiple priorities and projects in a diverse environment.
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 apply. We do not discriminate against any person based upon their race, traits historically associated with race, religion, color, national origin, sex, pregnancy or related medical conditions, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristics.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a remote-first organization with staff members including contractors based 40+ countries*. Salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are set in a way that is competitive, equitable, and consistent with our values and culture. The anticipated annual pay range of this position for applicants based within the United States is US$136,760 to US$210,769 with multiple individualized factors, including cost of living in the location, being the determinants of the offered pay. For applicants located outside of the US, the pay range will be adjusted to the country of hire. We neither ask for nor take into consideration the salary history of applicants. The compensation for a successful applicant will be based on their skills, experience and location.
*Please note that we are currently able to hire in the following:
US States: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia*, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico*, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming (*US Territory or Federal District)
Countries: Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya*, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore*, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Our non-US employees are hired through a local third party Employer of Record (EOR) and must have current work authorization in their location. (*citizens/permanent residents only)
We periodically review this list to streamline to ensure alignment with our hiring requirements.
All applicants can reach out to their recruiter to understand more about the specific pay range for their location during the interview process.
If you are a qualified applicant requiring assistance or an accommodation to complete any step of the application process due to a disability, you may contact us at recruiting@wikimedia.org or +1 (415) 839-6885.
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