Director, Data Science and Engineering, Finance

Who we are: 

Motive builds technology to improve the safety, productivity, and profitability of businesses that power the physical economy. Motive combines IoT hardware with AI-powered applications to connect and automate physical operations. Motive is one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world, serving more than 120,000 businesses, across a wide range of industries including trucking and logistics, construction, oil and gas, food and beverage, field service, agriculture, passenger transit, and delivery.

Motive is built on four foundational attributes; Own It, Less but Better, Build Trust, and Unlock Potential. This has taken our company to great heights, including being recognized by Fortune for Best Workplaces, Forbes Best Startup Employers, and Comparably for our Best Global Culture, Sales Team, Leadership Team, Career Growth, and CEO for Diversity. We’re proud to receive an employee net promoter score of 63 (according to Comparably) which places Motive in the top 5% of companies with 4,000 employees or more. 

Today, our team is made up of more than 3,000 employees, located across the world, providing support to a wide range of customers. While most of our employees are remote, many have the opportunity to work on-site at any of our 8 global office locations. Visit our careers website to learn more about opportunities at Motive. 

About the Role:

We are building a data team within finance to own our financial KPI reporting and key data intensive forecasts and analyses such as pricing, demand by product line, billings and collections, churn and LTV.  This role will inform many facets of corporate planning and will be heavily engaged by teams inside and outside of Finance, as well as by executive management, the board, and in external reporting to our investors.  

The Director of Financial Data Science and Engineering will build an initial team of 3-4 engineers and analysts to create and maintain these forecasts and reports. This role will be responsible for aligning financial KPIs with best practice, building and maintaining stable reporting pipelines and central dashboards for tracking KPIs, and enabling the business on both their definition and uses.  The role will also be responsible for improving the accuracy of key financial forecasts via the use of large data sets. The role will work closely with the core FP&A function, GTM finance, strategic finance, and deal desk and is meant to support them in their work planning and managing the business.

What You'll Do:

The Director of Financial Data Science and Engineering will lead a team of 3+ people that will be responsible for the following: 

Own financial KPI reporting

• Rigorously define financial KPIs in line with best practice
• Work with cross-functional partners to source data from key business systems
• Own and maintain financial KPI data pipelines and reporting including ARR, Billing and Collections, etc.
• Leverage scheduling, automation, and data orchestration tools to create efficient data pipelines
• Perform data QA and develop automated testing procedures
• Provide input into data governance strategies and frameworks including permissions and security models, data lineage systems, and data definitions

Data-intensive analysis and forecasting

• Evolve core financial analyses and forecasts using large data sets and machine learning to improve their accuracy
• Partner with the broader finance function to incorporate improved analyses and forecasts into overall financial plans

Business partnering

• Communicating with technical and nontechnical stakeholders to make sure solutions are understood by all involved and meet business needs
• Promote and drive a self-service data culture by developing self-service data models, building easy to use tools and dashboards and teaching business users how to use them.
• Enable business partners on KPI definition and uses

What We're Looking For:

• 10+ years of relevant experience in data science and engineering focused on financial data and models
• Advanced knowledge of SQL, Data Pipelines, and scheduling, as well as experience in either Python or R 
• A desire to learn about the important drivers of various departments, and bring advanced data models to bare on practical business problems
• Strong executive presence and comfort communicating with the C-suite
• Familiarity with SaaS business metrics and core financial systems such as Salesforce, Zoura and Netsuite a plus
• Proven ability to lead teams and complex cross-functional projects
• Expert communication skills
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