Controller Services, Team Lead

The Role

A Controller Team Lead is responsible for leading a team of Controllers. Controller Team Leads act as the escalation path and backstop for Controllers and are the people manager for all team members on their team. The Controller Team Lead is ultimately responsible for ensuring their team meets all customer experience (e.g., SLA, CSAT) and productivity goals (e.g., toggle/billing expectations) and is responsible for driving positive outcomes that are aligned with Pilot’s company goals. Controller Team Leads engage in a variety of duties such as allocating work, making prioritization and tradeoff decisions, unblocking escalations, and ensuring that customer deliverables are shipped to customers on time. Your role as a Controller Team Lead also involves recruiting and growing your team, developing a strategy, empowering the team to execute on their goals, and unblocking the team when problems are escalated.   

Objectives of this Role

• Act as a bridge between Controller ICs and Sr. Management to ensure higher-level strategies and objectives are implemented at the team level
• Maintain organizational standards for customer satisfaction, deliverables quality, and team performance
• Ensure your team is providing our customers with a white glove experience
• Create a collaborative environment in which team members feel supported, engaged, and have the necessary tools to perform their job duties at a high level 
• Flag and escalate feedback that could be constructive to improving your team’s and or a customer’s experience, inclusive of productivity 

 

Key Responsibilities

• Contribute to a positive customer relationship by ensuring that your team is meeting customer expectations by delivering high-quality work on time and meeting SLA requirements
• Collaborate cross-functionally with other Operations leaders to ensure a cohesive customer experience and helping your team build strong relationships across other Ops functions
• Use your industry expertise to recommend process improvements to maximize accuracy and efficiency within our financial statement close process
• Investigate accounting issues to develop methodology based upon accounting principles
• Investigate and unblock executive escalations, ensuring to provide updates to various stakeholders is a concise and responded to within SLA timeframe
• Understand team needs (whether performance based or potential accommodations needed) and proactively address challenges within the team and/or escalate to managers or cross-functional partners that can help 
• In partnership with the People team, facilitate continuous improvement by providing fair and consistent feedback to individuals on your team.
• Develop members of your team to become highly effective Controllers
• Cultivate an environment of growth and mentorship to develop the leadership skills of senior team members and prepare them for people management or technical lead roles
• Interview, onboard new hires, and grow and develop members of the team
• Build a culture in which differences are appreciated and everyone is valued
• Be a coach to your team: facilitate and help unblock, rather than do the work for them
• Keep abreast of recent accounting pronouncements and market trends to provide guidance to our internal teams (and clients as needed), ensuring we are representing industry best practices based upon accounting principles 

 

Skills and Qualifications

• Previous experience in a management role, managing teams of at least five or more 
• High level of independence and maturity 
• Ability to instruct, communicate effectively (written and verbal), and provide feedback and coaching to direct reports 
• A high degree of empathy and operates in a fair and consistent way
• Self starter and ability to prioritize effectively
• Ability to demonstrate a high level of emotional intelligence
• You are in good performance standing
• Proficient in workflow management and tracking
• Obsessively obsessed with attention to detail 
• A love of problem solving and making teams and processes more efficient
• Comfortable engaging with C-Suite Executives 
• Experience completing financial consolidation and engaging with external auditors 
• Exposure to M&A activity

 

Preferred Qualifications

• B.S. or M.S. in Accounting or equivalent
• CPA and/or MBA preferred but not required
• 8+ years of experience consisting of public, private, or outsourced accounting required,  especially with venture backed start-ups
• Minimum of 3 years in a management position
• Excellent verbal and written communication sk