Director, Program Chief Financial Officer, Financial Planning & Analysis – Global Policy & Advocacy and Communications

Gates Foundation • Seattle, WA

13d • $335,000 - $519,200

About The Position

The Foundation We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities. As a workplace, we’re committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally. The Team The Finance & Resource Planning (F&RP) Division is led by the foundation CFO and partners with our colleagues to invest resources wisely and boldly in service of people who need it most. The Finance, Planning and Analysis (FP&A) team provides business and financial support to program strategy teams (PSTs) across the foundation, maintaining dedicated client relationships as an embedded member of a client team. The FP&A team is responsible for optimizing portfolios to achieve foundation goals, strategic financial analysis and modeling, engaging with partners and grantees, and identifying and analyzing grants to maximize foundation impact. Strategic Finance: Work with the offices of the president of GPA and Communications and lead annual planning for your divisions, forecasting throughout the year, and multi-year financial planning across portfolios. Portfolio Management: Optimize finite resources across portfolios to achieve foundation goals using a fluid capital market approach to fund priorities. This includes working with teams to identify trade-offs. Partners and Grantees: Work with program teams to engage in coordinated strategic and business analysis across funders and institutions with shared strategic objectives and strengthen partners’ capacity to execute. Grants/Investment Management: Assess value for money, identify and mitigate risk through milestones, and provide financial analysis to enhance grant impact. Your Role The Program Chief Financial Officer (PCFO) will act as a leader for all financial management work in programs creating a deeper alignment between finance functions and program strategy leads, operations, and business support staff. The PCFO is responsible for all major program financial functions and processes, serving as the key interface between PST leadership and other F&RP functions. Additionally, the PCFO collaborates with the CFO on foundation-wide initiatives and will act as an in-house authority on an agreed upon functional need (e.g., partner organizational effectiveness, modeling work, business development, costing etc.). In this role, the PCFO will lead annual planning, forecasting, and portfolio optimization efforts, translating program strategy into clear financial priorities, tradeoffs, and resource-allocation decisions. The PCFO will also provide strategic financial counsel to program leadership, proactively identifying risks, opportunities, and execution challenges to support timely, data-driven decision-making. Managing a team of FP&A professionals deployed to their aligned program(s), this role will strengthen FP&A capabilities and provide an enhanced level of service and accountability to PSTs and regional offices, while ensuring good stewardship of foundation resources. This position reports to the CFO and sits on the program leadership team(s) based on client alignment, as well as a member of the foundation’s senior leadership forum. This position supports the grant and investment strategy for the Global Policy & Advocacy and Communications divisions at the foundation. The mission of the Global Policy & Advocacy (GPA) division is to understand and shape the public policy debates affecting the foundation's work, build support for its major program and policy objectives, and develop partnerships and alliances that can advance the foundation's objectives nationally and globally. Because the foundation's resources alone are not enough to solve the challenges ahead, GPA also supports advocacy efforts to engage diverse partners and promote innovative solutions that advance our program goals. The Communications Division oversees the foundation’s global communications strategy. The division unites internal and external communications to advance the foundation’s mission and amplify its impact around the world. This includes reputation and risk management, region-specific communications, creative and brand strategies, leadership voice and employee communications. GPA and Communications divisions work in close partnership with grantees, colleagues in the Global Health, Global Development, Global Growth & Opportunity, U.S. and Gender Equality programs to build the environment in which all people have the opportunity to lead healthy and productive lives.

Requirements

• Masters/MBA preferred with 15+ years of experience in finance and operations, management consulting, or equivalent.
• Strong financial and analytical background with a focus on skills that facilitate decision making (e.g., net present value (NPV) analysis, cash flow forecasting, etc.)
• Experience in designing efficient processes to deliver budget and key financial analyses.
• Experience operating in global, cross-cultural environments and comfortable engaging at the executive level, translating complex financial and programmatic realities that may not appear quantifiable into clear, actionable insights for senior leaders and partners.
• Ability to influence without authority, establish trust and rapport, and develop consensus among diverse perspectives to reach creative solutions across a multitude of different internal roles ranging from president/CEO/chair, program staff, and external partners like leadership of key grantees, other partners.
• Adept in navigating complex, matrixed environments; able to create simplicity from complexity to ensure financial rigor is balanced with practical implementation.
• Takes initiative, uses organizational skills and works autonomously, while remaining flexible to changing tasks, priorities, and roles and responsibilities.
• Demonstrated experience leading, managing, and developing high-performing teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, succession planning, and building inclusive, resilient teams across functions and geographies.
• Strong relationship management and communication skills; able to effectively inspire and direct staff (including cross-functional teams) in the areas of professional development, recruitment, performance, time management and portfolio management.
• Models professional courage by engaging in trust-based debate, asking hard or unpopular questions, and is willing to say no.
• Resilient in the face of change, and open-minded in developing solutions that strive for impact first.
• Intellectually curious with solution orientation and the ability to identify new ways of working.
• Must be able to legally work in the country where this position is located without visa sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

• Content expertise in a related field, such as international development, global policy & advocacy, and/or communications is strongly preferred.
• International finance expertise, including exposure to capital and currency markets and blended finance models in developing countries, is also preferred.

Responsibilities

• Financial Management & Leadership: Owns program process to align with foundation planning cycle; uses analytics to inform financial decisions for PST leaders and division presidents; Oversees complex analytics and projects that require financial expertise; facilitates program resource allocation process. Leads annual planning and forecasting processes for GPA and Communications divisions, ensuring clear articulation of assumptions, risks, tradeoffs, and performance metrics. Partners with PST leadership to translate strategy into executable financial plans and to manage execution as conditions change.
• Investment Development, Structuring & Management: In partnership with PST(s), acts as a critical thought partner providing functional expertise on investments including supporting the origination and structuring of sophisticated investments (e.g., grants, contracts, and program-related investments), partner organization due diligence and managing program financial risks. May play a key client-facing role with external partners. Provides input to investment portfolio management decisions in support of planning, forecasting and tradeoff decision making.
• FP&A Service Delivery Lead: Serves as bridge and primary source of program input to Finance; co-creates policies and processes that impact program; ensures program policies conform to foundation-wide standards and provides appropriate deliverables.
• Impact First: Adept at ensuring a strong value proposition of the Financial Planning & Analysis function to deliver impact in support of programmatic work.
• Assurance: Coordinates with the Assurance and Risk Management team on grantee audits and finance-facing internal audit and advisory engagements. Contributes to the foundation risk register.
• Relationship Management: Builds and maintains strong relationships with division president and other PST leadership as a thought partner to make sure financial needs are supported. Also responsible for high quality interactions and clear, consistent communications with grantees and partners in the field.
• Foundation Leadership: Participates as an active leader in the finance leadership team collaborating with other PCFOs in developing strategy and goals aligned with our operations framework. Coordinates to share best practices, develop policy, and provide input on overarching issues.
• Team Management: Leads and manages a team of diverse program financial managers and associates that provide global financial support across the foundation. Prioritizes diversity, equity, and inclusion and acts on these priorities by fostering diverse, equitable and inclusive practices to create a work environment where everyone can do their best work in contributing towards our impact. Hires the talent needed to achieve our goals, ensuring successful employee onboarding, communicating performance expectations, creating goal alignment, resiliency, integrating project and change management, giving and seeking feedback, providing coaching, measuring progress, and holding people accountable, supporting employee development, and recognizing achievement and lessons learned.
• Decision-Making: The most important decisions this position makes are who to hire and how to build a strong and resilient team that can help improve impact with stewardship. Provides input and is a strong thought partner but may not be the final decision-maker on many decisions. Needs to be humble and comfortable using a more influential leadership style rather than having broad formal authority. Needs to be insightful on types of investments to make the most impact. Needs to be comfortable making grounded and well-researched assumptions as it relates to financial modeling and analytics.

Benefits

• exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director