Engagement Lead, Finance and Accounting

TQA•Austin, TX

13d•Onsite

About The Position

We are hiring a senior finance and accounting leader to become the domain authority on a major agentic AI and automation program inside a global marketing services group. You will not run a ledger. You will sit alongside the client’s transformation and controllership leadership, find the finance processes where agents and automation create genuine P&L value, prove the case in numbers, and keep a validated pipeline ahead of a multi-country delivery team. This is a client advisory role first and a delivery role second. Our client is a publicly traded, digital-first global marketing network: more than 50 agency partners, over 13,000 specialists, operations across 40 countries, and revenue of approximately $2.9 billion. That federated structure produces finance and accounting complexity at scale. Many legal entities and ledgers, high-volume intercompany activity, project and job-level accounting, pass-through and media billing, and a monthly close that spans multiple agencies, currencies, and jurisdictions. TQA has delivered automation for this client for more than nine months. The program is now moving from opportunistic quick wins to a curated, value-led pipeline delivered through dedicated pods. The constraint is finance domain judgment at the top of the funnel. The client’s transformation leadership cannot be in every finance conversation, so opportunities go unqualified and skilled delivery capacity waits on work that has not been validated or standardized. This role closes that gap. You become the finance and accounting voice inside the program: the person in the room when agency and shared services teams talk about how work actually gets done, the person who recognizes where an agent beats a rule-based robot, and the person who hands delivery a backlog that is quantified, standardized, and ready to build.

Requirements

Twelve or more years in finance and accounting, including significant time in controllership, financial operations, shared services, or finance transformation leadership. A qualified accountant background is strongly preferred, for example CPA, CMA, ACA, ACCA, or CIMA.
Deep, hands-on process knowledge across the finance lifecycle: month-end close and consolidation, intercompany, order to cash and collections, purchase to pay, expense and vendor management, and management reporting.
Demonstrated delivery of finance transformation using automation, AI, or agentic solutions, with benefits you can describe and defend in numbers.
A track record of client-facing or business partnering work at CFO, controller, and vice president level. You are comfortable being the most senior finance voice in the room.
Proven ability to build business cases and value models that finance leaders accept and finance teams can verify.
Experience inside a complex multi-entity, multi-currency environment, ideally with shared services or global business services exposure.
Based in the United States with the right to work in the United States, and willing to travel to client sites occasionally.

Nice To Haves

Finance leadership inside a marketing, advertising, media, or professional services business. You understand job and project accounting, work in progress, billable utilization, pass-through and media billing, principal versus agent revenue treatment, and the economics of a federated agency network.
Public company reporting experience, including SOX 404 control design and testing and working alongside internal and external audit.
Practical familiarity with UiPath, Microsoft Power Platform and Azure AI, or ServiceNow. Enough to judge feasibility credibly without designing the solution yourself.
Applied understanding of agentic AI in a finance context: when an agent outperforms a rule-based robot, how to set guardrails, and where a human must stay in the loop for control reasons.
Consulting or professional services delivery experience, including scope discipline, commercial awareness, and account growth.
Exposure to the finance platform landscape common to agency groups, for example NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, Workday Financials, Coupa, BlackLine, or agency systems such as Workamajig or Advantage.

Responsibilities

Advise the client, proactively: Act as the trusted finance and accounting advisor to the client’s transformation, controllership, and shared services leadership. Bring a point of view rather than waiting for a brief.
Represent the automation and AI agenda in agency and functional meetings where the client’s transformation team cannot be present. Act as their proxy and their advocate.
Challenge process design before automating it. Recommend standardization, control improvement, or retirement so that the program automates a good process rather than an efficient bad one.
Build relationships across the agency network so that finance leaders bring opportunities to you directly.
Own the pipeline and the value case: Identify, qualify, size, and sequence candidate processes across record to report, order to cash, purchase to pay, close and consolidation, intercompany, and management reporting.
Quantify each candidate: current effort and cost, target state, expected benefit, control impact, and payback. Present it in language a CFO organization accepts.
Keep a validated backlog running ahead of delivery capacity so that architects, analysts, and developers are never waiting on undefined work.
Decide, with the client, what to automate now, what to standardize first, and where an agentic solution is the right answer rather than traditional automation.
Shape solutions and assure delivery: Partner with solution architects and business analysts to turn finance process knowledge into agentic and automation designs on UiPath, Microsoft, and ServiceNow.
Set acceptance criteria that finance and audit will sign off, covering segregation of duties, evidence retention, auditability, and control impact in a public company environment.
Chair value readouts with client leadership. Connect delivered work to measured financial outcome rather than activity completed.
Support hypercare, knowledge transfer, and handover so that benefits persist after go-live.
Grow the account and the practice: Identify and shape adjacent opportunities, for example internal audit and controls testing, HR operations, and managed service, and work with the account team to bring them forward.
Feed reusable finance patterns, benchmarks, and accelerators back into TQA’s industry solutions library.
Coach TQA and client colleagues on finance domain context so that the whole pod raises its own commercial judgment.