Strategic Finance Executive, Automattic

The Company

Automattic — the global leader in publishing, messaging, and commerce software — is building the operating system for the open web. Our goal is to democratize publishing, messaging, and commerce so that anyone with a story can tell it, and anyone with a product can sell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or where they live in the world. With a strong commitment to open source, we have deep roots in WordPress, the platform that powers our business and 43% of the web.

We own a diverse set of assets, deploy numerous business models, and offer scalability from B2C to SMB and Enterprise customers in a fast-paced, complex market. Our brands include WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, Jetpack, Tumblr, Beeper, and a business incubator full of early-stage scale-ups.

The co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, is driving a growth and expansion strategy that is still in its ‘early days’ with a massive addressable market and exceptional upside. Today, we manage the internet properties for renowned organizations such as Salesforce, Porsche, Meta, Disney, and NASA. Over 4 million online stores run on WooCommerce, which accounts for 27% of all online stores globally, and more than 1 billion people use our products each month. Automattic has established itself as a pivotal player in the digital landscape.

We’re a distributed company with more than 1700 Automatticians in nearly every corner of the globe, speaking over a hundred different languages. Unlike many companies, we are and will always be 100% remote (we call it distributed). This means that you can work from anywhere in the world, in any time zone, leveraging collaboration tools and asynchronous communication.

Automattic’s story would not be complete without mentioning our focus on mergers and acquisitions. Over the past 17 years, we’ve acquired 35 companies, including WooCommerce, Parse.ly, and most recently, Texts.com and Beeper, our multi-channel messaging plays. These acquisitions now represent some of Automattic’s largest business units and growth drivers.

Our company is backed by some of the world’s most respected investors, spanning mutual funds, venture capital, sovereign wealth, and strategics. These include Salesforce Ventures, Insight Venture Partners, ICONIQ Capital, True Ventures, Wellington Management, BlackRock Asset Management, Alta Park Capital, Schonfeld, New York Times Company, and Tiger Global Management.

Our Board includes Sue Decker, who also serves on the boards of Berkshire Hathaway, Costco, and Vox Media, as well as Ann Dunwoody, the first female four-star general in the US Army. Automattic is profitable, generates positive cash flow, and is aggressively investing in future growth. 

The Opportunity

We are seeking an exceptional, strategic leader to join us. This individual will be responsible for communicating key business insights to our Board, creating investor relations content, managing strategic projects, overseeing CFO responsibilities for our incubator businesses, and contributing to the wider Finance team. This highly visible role will involve partnering with our CFO, CEO, and our business unit GMs, and will communicate directly with our Board through their written materials.

This role will actively participate in the M&A and corporate development process as the company continues to expand its revenue, products, services, and talent through inorganic growth. Additionally, this role will provide an internal career path for a successor to a business unit CFO position.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership of the board meeting preparation process, proactively creating proposed structures and content, and building a meaningful first draft of the board deck. Engage in iterative coordination and refinement directly with the CFO to ensure alignment with expectations and strategic objectives.

• Own, write, build, and coordinate the creation of a public-company quality investor update, ensuring clear and compelling communication of financial and strategic developments to investors and stakeholders.

• Conduct in-depth competitor earnings analysis to identify trends, patterns, and key insights, providing strategic recommendations to enhance our competitive position and drive growth.

• Oversee the creation of reporting packages in support of providing business partners, with timely and insightful summaries, dashboards, and KPIs of financial results. Highlight results to the leadership team and provide recommended action steps. 

• Provide leadership and support for a 3-year 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.

• 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 practices, process efficiency, and sharing across the company’s matrix organization.

Requirements

• Business acumen, strategic agility, and operational intuition to go beyond the numbers in dissecting and analyzing business issues, challenges, and opportunities.

• Experience in building and writing board-level presentations and public-company- quality quarterly shareholder updates/letters, showcasing strong communication skills and the ability to convey complex financial and strategic information effectively.

• Experience as a financial and operations leader with demonstrated financial discipline and success in a high-growth, rapidly changing environment.

• Public company experience, preferably IPO, 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).

• 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.

• Self-starter and ability to take complete ownership of their areas of responsibility.

• Advanced skills in communication and leadership through influence and data-driven decision-making.

• Adopts a broad, long-term perspective on the business, including customer segments and the external environment. Develops hypotheses or alternative scenarios of how critical issues will play out beyond the year, and uses these to set challenging goals with future payoffs or outcomes.

Cultural fit is critically important and includes trust, professionalism, collaboration, and a bias for action. 

Salary range: $120,000-$200,000 USD - Please note that salary ranges are global, regardless of location, and we pay in local currency.

Read more about our compensation philosophy and benefits.