Strategic Finance Executive, Automattic

The Company

Automattic owns a diverse set of assets, deploys numerous business models, and supports both B2C and B2B customers in a fast-paced, complex market. We are composed of WordPress.com, WooCommerce, an Enterprise content management system called WordPress VIP, Jetpack, Tumblr, and a business incubator full of potential future products. Our business is built on WordPress, which powers 43% of all websites.

Matt Mullenweg, the co-Founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, is driving a growth and expansion strategy that is still in its ‘early days’ with a massive TAM and exceptional upside. With a mission to democratize publishing and commerce, Automattic employees have an extraordinary opportunity to contribute to something meaningful and uniquely special.

Our platform offers scalability from B2C to SMB to Enterprise, providing both horizontal and vertical solutions. Our customer base ranges from individual consumers to Fortune 50 companies, and extends to large public sector organizations. We manage the internet properties for renowned organizations such as Salesforce, Porsche, Meta, Disney, and NASA. With over 4 million online stores running WooCommerce, accounting for 27% of all online stores globally, and more than 1 billion people using our products monthly, Automattic has established itself as a pivotal player in the digital landscape.

We are a team of 1,900, which has grown by 250% in the past three years, spread across 94 countries. 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 is highly acquisitive and focuses intently on mergers and acquisitions. Over the past 17 years, we’ve acquired 35 companies, including WooCommerce, Parse.ly, and most recently, Texts.com, a multi-channel messaging play. 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.

Automattic is a great place to build a career, learn, and contribute!

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.

Read more about our compensation philosophy and benefits.

Salary range: $120,000-$200,000 USD

About Automattic

We are the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, Simplenote, Jetpack, Longreads, Day One, PocketCasts, and more. We believe in making the web a better place.

We’re a distributed company with more than 1900 Automatticians in 96 countries speaking 120+ different languages. And, even more than growth and profitability (although we’re plenty profitable), above all, we’re driven by a mission: We democratize publishing and commerce so anyone with a story can tell it, and anyone with a product can sell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or country.

We believe in Open Source, and the vast majority of our work is available under the GPL.

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion at Automattic

We’re improving diversity in the tech industry. At Automattic, we want people to love their work and show respect and empathy to all. We welcome differences and strive to increase participation from traditionally underrepresented groups. Our DEI committee involves Automatticians across the company and drives grassroots change. For example, this group has helped facilitate private online spaces for affiliated Automatticians to gather and helps run a monthly DEI People Lab series for further learning. DEI is a priority at Automattic, though our dedication influences far more than just Automatticians: We make our products freely available and translate our products into and offer customer support in numerous languages. We require unconscious bias training for our hiring teams and ensure our products are accessible across different bandwidths and devices.

Automattic is a Most Loved Company and Disability Confident Committed. (Here’s what that might mean for you.) Learn more about our dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion and our Employee Resource Groups.