Senior Manager, Finance Business Architect

Workday•Pleasanton, CA

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Digital Enablement team within the Finance Transformation Office (FTO) is responsible for enabling Workday Finance's transformation strategy with scalable, intelligent, and trusted digital capabilities. We drive data excellence, automation, and AI-powered solutions that deliver efficiency, and data-driven insights across the Finance organization. Our team is a cornerstone of proving how modern finance operates when powered by Workday Financials, automation, and next-generation AI. If you are energized by working at the intersection of finance, technology, and data, and want to shape the way a world-class finance organization runs, this is the team for you. As the Senior Manager, Finance Business Architect on the Digital Enablement team, you will architect our journey to an AI-first finance function and ensure all the building blocks are in place to maximize value and trust. You sit at the intersection of finance, technology, and data — consolidating and evolving our finance ecosystem, defining our business architecture, and delivering data quality and governance foundations that will make our finance function AI-ready. This is a high-impact, cross-functional role for someone who can translate business needs into technology solutions and who cares deeply about data integrity as a foundation for intelligent decision-making.

Requirements

12+ years of experience in finance technology, business architecture, data governance, or a related discipline, with progressive responsibility.
5+ years of experience leading and developing high-performing teams.
Demonstrated understanding of core finance processes — close, consolidation, planning, reporting, and procurement-to-pay, Order-to-cash, FP&A.
Experience building anomaly detection frameworks within a finance context, including designing detection logic, defining thresholds, and operationalizing alerts to identify data inconsistencies, process exceptions, or financial irregularities.

Nice To Haves

Experience translating finance process requirements into scalable system and data designs, including mapping current-state and future-state processes, defining data flows, and documenting system interdependencies and integration patterns
Skilled in overseeing finance platforms and systems, including establishing tiered support models, escalation paths, and continuous improvement cycles to ensure system stability and performance
Experience with automation technologies and AI/ML concepts, including what it means for data to be "AI-ready" — structured, labeled, consistent, and governed.
Exposure to additional AI or machine learning applications within Finance is valued, such as forecasting models or NLP for invoice processing.
Expertise in designing data quality frameworks and working with data lineage, master data management, or data catalog tools.
Familiarity with data governance tools such as Collibra, Alation, or Microsoft Purview is a plus.
Experience with modern data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, or dbt, with the ability to collaborate with Data Engineering and Analytics teams to build and validate AI-ready finance data sets and pipelines.
Skilled in building productive relationships across various teams to drive alignment on shared priorities.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce clear documentation, frameworks, and executive-level presentations that drive decision-making and alignment
Foster a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous learning across distributed teams.

Responsibilities

Partner with Business Technology on the Finance Technology roadmap, evaluating, rationalizing, and consolidating the tool landscape to reduce redundancy and improve efficiency.
Align with enterprise architecture and partner with Business Technology and Finance leadership to assess platforms and systems and prioritize investments.
Serve as the Finance Business Architect, translating finance process requirements into scalable system and data designs.
Drive explicit data design needs.
Source‑of‑truth systems and how data flows between them.
Define the system and integration patterns that satisfy those needs.
Determine what sits in Workday vs data warehouse vs planning tool.
Diagnose which integrations (APIs, files, event streams) are needed and how they’re orchestrated.
Partner with Process Owners to translate their outcome‑based process design into a coherent data and technology architecture, identifying where today’s systems or data model will prevent us from hitting those outcomes, and defining what needs to change.
Lead the identification and resolution of data integrity and consistency issues across finance systems and data pipelines.
Define and enforce standards for finance master data management (MDM) — including charts of accounts, cost centers, legal entities, and intercompany structures — and drive initiatives to ensure finance data is clean, complete, timely, and structured to enable AI and advanced analytics use cases.
Lead data mapping and integration across systems including Workday, Salesforce, and Snowflake.
Ensure alignment and consistency of data across systems, reports, and finance processes.
Build and maintain reconciliation and validation frameworks to ensure data accuracy and completeness.
Monitor data quality, resolve discrepancies, and drive root cause analysis.
Help design and implement a Finance Data Governance framework, including policies, ownership models, stewardship accountabilities, and escalation paths partnering with the data governance team within a workday.
Define data quality dimensions (accuracy, completeness, timeliness, consistency), build monitoring and alerting mechanisms, and establish data quality scorecards and reporting for finance leadership.
Champion a data-first culture within the Finance organization, embedding governance practices into day-to-day operations.