Engagement Lead, Finance and Accounting

TQA•Austin, TX

12d•Onsite

About The Position

TQA is seeking a senior finance and accounting leader to serve as the domain authority on a major agentic AI and automation program within a global marketing services group. This role focuses on identifying finance processes where agents and automation can create significant P&L value, quantifying this value, and maintaining a pipeline of opportunities for a multi-country delivery team. It is primarily a client advisory role, secondarily a delivery role. The client is a publicly traded, digital-first global marketing network with over 50 agency partners, 13,000+ specialists, operations in 40 countries, and approximately $2.9 billion in revenue. This federated structure presents significant finance and accounting complexity, including numerous legal entities, high-volume intercompany activity, project/job-level accounting, pass-through and media billing, and a complex monthly close process spanning multiple agencies, currencies, and jurisdictions. TQA has been automating for this client for over nine months, and the program is now shifting from opportunistic wins to a curated, value-led pipeline delivered by dedicated pods. The key challenge is a lack of finance domain judgment at the top of the funnel, leading to unqualified opportunities and idle delivery capacity. This role aims to bridge that gap by acting as the finance and accounting voice within the program, identifying opportunities where agentic solutions are superior to rule-based automation, and delivering a quantified, standardized, and ready-to-build backlog to the delivery team.

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 (e.g., 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 quantifiable benefits.
A track record of client-facing or business partnering work at CFO, controller, and vice president level.
Comfort 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 within 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.
Willing to travel to client sites occasionally.

Nice To Haves

Finance leadership experience within a marketing, advertising, media, or professional services business.
Understanding of 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 experience working alongside internal and external audit.
Practical familiarity with UiPath, Microsoft Power Platform and Azure AI, or ServiceNow, sufficient to judge feasibility without designing solutions.
Applied understanding of agentic AI in a finance context, including when an agent outperforms a rule-based robot, setting guardrails, and identifying when human oversight is necessary 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 (e.g., NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, Workday Financials, Coupa, BlackLine, or agency systems like Workamajig or Advantage).

Responsibilities

Act as the trusted finance and accounting advisor to the client’s transformation, controllership, and shared services leadership, proactively bringing a point of view.
Represent the automation and AI agenda in agency and functional meetings where the client’s transformation team cannot be present, acting as their proxy and advocate.
Challenge process design before automating it, recommending standardization, control improvement, or retirement to ensure good processes are automated.
Build relationships across the agency network so that finance leaders bring opportunities directly.
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 process, including current effort/cost, target state, expected benefit, control impact, and payback, presenting this in a format acceptable to CFO organizations.
Maintain a validated backlog of opportunities ahead of delivery capacity, ensuring architects, analysts, and developers have defined work.
Collaborate with the client to decide which processes to automate, standardize, or address with agentic solutions.
Partner with solution architects and business analysts to translate finance process knowledge into agentic and automation designs on UiPath, Microsoft, and ServiceNow.
Set acceptance criteria for finance and audit sign-off, covering segregation of duties, evidence retention, auditability, and control impact in a public company environment.
Chair value readouts with client leadership, connecting delivered work to measured financial outcomes.
Support hypercare, knowledge transfer, and handover to ensure sustained benefits post-go-live.
Identify and shape adjacent opportunities (e.g., internal audit, HR operations, managed services) and work with the account team to pursue them.
Feed reusable finance patterns, benchmarks, and accelerators into TQA’s industry solutions library.
Coach TQA and client colleagues on finance domain context to enhance the commercial judgment of the entire pod.