Principal, Finance Business Architecture & Solution Strategy

Company Description

LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network, built to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Our products help people make powerful connections, discover exciting opportunities, build necessary skills, and gain valuable insights every day. We're also committed to providing transformational opportunities for our own employees by investing in their growth. We aspire to create a culture that's built on trust, care, inclusion, and fun – where everyone can succeed.

Join us to transform the way the world works.

Job Description

This role will be based in San Francisco or Sunnyvale.

At LinkedIn, our approach to flexible work is centered on trust and optimized for culture, connection, clarity, and the evolving needs of our business. The work location of this role is hybrid, meaning it will be performed both from home and from a LinkedIn office on select days, as determined by the business needs of the team.

We are seeking a Principal Process Architect, Finance Business Architecture & Solution Strategy to join the Architecture & Strategy pillar within the Center of Ops Innovation (COI) at LinkedIn. This role operates as a strategic accelerator for Finance transformation, sitting upstream of delivery and engineering to define business architecture, solution strategy, and decision frameworks that enable scalable, high-quality execution. 

As a Principal Architect, you will serve as the catalyst for translating Finance strategy into clear, decision-ready solution paths simplifying complexity, shaping enterprise-wide consistency, and ensuring initiatives begin with strong problem framing, well-defined options, and explicit decision guardrails. This role is critical in shifting Finance transformation from fragmented, reactive execution to intentional, scalable, and proactive architecture-led delivery. 

Responsibilities 

• Define future-state Finance business capabilities across domains (R2R, S2P, O2C,FP&A.) 
• Develop business-led architecture frameworks and reference patterns to ensure consistency across initiatives 
• Establish system interaction and data ownership principles at a business level 
• Lead buy vs. build vs. hybrid assessments, evaluating scalability, risk, cost, and time-to-value 
• Develop clear, decision-ready solution options, including trade-offs across cost, flexibility, speed and long-term architectural fit 
• Enable leadership to make high-quality, timely decisions with full visibility into implications 
• Conduct platform and vendor capability evaluations aligned to Finance needs (not technical design) 
• Prevent vendor-driven solution bias by grounding decisions in business priorities and long-term strategy 
• Support structured evaluations including RFPs, POCs, and market assessments 
• Establish clear assumptions, constraints, and guardrails for each initiative 
• Define: 
  • what is in scope vs. out of scope 
  • what decisions are locked vs. open 
  • what trade-offs are acceptable vs. non-negotiable 
• Reduce ambiguity and prevent mid-stream scope and direction changes 
• Define business-level guardrails for AI and automation adoption, ensuring: 
  • compliance 
  • scalability 
  • risk mitigation 
• Ensure solution decisions align with long-term automation and intelligent finance strategy
• Translate solution options into investment implications for FY planning 
• Partner with Finance leadership to: 
  • shape ROI narratives 
  • align solution choices with funding and prioritization decisions 
• Ensure short-term decisions are evaluated against long-term cost and scalability 
• Act as a trusted advisor to Process Owners, Finance leadership, and Engineering 
• Orchestrate inputs across: 
  • Delivery teams 
  • Engineering 
  • Data Strategy 
  • COE / Innovation teams 
• Drive alignment without direct authority in a highly matrixed environment 
• Provide clear problem framing and solution direction before delivery kickoff 
• Support delivery teams with advisory guidance, without owning execution 
• Enable faster startup times, reduced rework and improved consistency across initiatives 

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent work experience.
• 10+ years of experience in Finance, Accounting, Finance Technology, or Finance transformation.
• Experience leading large-scale transformation initiatives across ERP, SaaS, or enterprise Finance technology ecosystems.
• Experience across end-to-end Finance processes, such as FP&A, Record-to-Report (R2R), Source-to-Pay