Director of Finance, Payments & Finance Transformation

We're seeking a dynamic, mission-critical mastermind to lead our Finance transformation agenda across global systems, data, and systems. This role isn't just about reporting; it's about building the foundation for hyper-scale growth and turning our Finance function into a data-driven, automated powerhouse.

You will be the key operator and visionary transforming how Kahoot! enables revenue growth, optimizes our subscription payments, and safeguards the business: all while ensuring our global finance function is prepared for its next milestone!

Key Collaborations: Operating at the Center of the Action!

This role operates at the center of Kahoot!’s operating model, with key partnerships including:

• CFO & Finance Leadership: Shaping the transformation strategy and driving adoption across all Finance teams (Accounting, Commercial, Operations).
• Product & Engineering Teams: Defining the systems, data pipelines and integration, and subscription payment requirements needed to rocket fuel revenue and scale.
• Data & Analytics Teams: Ensuring our Finance data models are scalable, governed, and integrated into our enterprise architecture.
• Sales, Sales Operations & Customer Success: Integrate financial and billing data with CRM, business intelligence, and customer workflows.
• Payments & Vendor Partners: Managing relationships with billing, gateway, and risk vendors to optimize performance and cost

Core Responsibilities: Your Impact Zones!

Strategic Leadership & Transformation: You Drive Mindset and Capabilities Change

• Co-lead the development and high-impact execution of the Finance and payments transformation roadmap, aligned perfectly with our business growth and Finance vision.
• Identify opportunities to redesign workflows, deploy automation, and eliminate manual effort (we call it ditching the dull stuff!) across the entire CFO organization.
• Drive a cultural and capability shift toward Digital Finance, leading the charge on training, change management, and adoption

Analytics Enablement: You Power Up Actionable Insights

• Lead the analytics modernization charge, enabling Finance to evolve from static reports to proactive insights and predictive models.
• Embed tools and frameworks that reduce dependency on manual analysis, boosting our diagnostic capabilities.
• Deliver complex data analysis, stunning dashboarding, and insightful ad-hoc reporting to our leadership and key business partners.

Payments & Risk Strategy and Execution: You Deliver Real Value

• You are the owner of Kahoot!’s global payments stack strategy and execution! This includes SaaS billing platforms (like Recurly), payment gateways (Stripe, Adyen), and fraud prevention solutions.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering and Customer Experience to optimize authorization rates, drastically reduce involuntary churn, and deliver a seamless checkout and renewal experience.
• Monitor payment cost trends and drive cost efficiency across provider contracts and global routes.
• Partner with vendors to pilot and roll out improvements to billing workflows, dunning logic, retries, and reconciliation
• Serve as Finance’s subject matter expert on payment systems integrations and customer-level payment behavior
• Implement and evolve robust risk controls to stop fraud and chargebacks in their tracks!

Systems & Digital Infrastructure: You Enable Future Growth

• Partner with the CFO on the evaluation, deployment, and evolution of our Finance systems (ERP, Tax Engines, Billing, Reporting).
• Champion automation across core Finance processes, exploring RPA solutions, AI agents, and API integrations 
• Lead governance of master data, systems documentation, and security protocols, keeping our data clean and safe.

Your Superpowers: Technical Expertise & Behaviors

Technical Fluency: You Lead by Example

• Tool Proficiency: You have expertise in modern Finance and analytics platforms (MS Power BI, ThoughtSpot, Recurly, HubSpot, MS Dynamics, Avalara, Google BigQuery).
• Coding & Automation: Practical knowledge of Python, SQL, or similar coding tools to automate workflows and build reusable datasets.
• AI Readiness: you leverage LLM tools, and have familiarity with RPA platforms and the orchestration of AI agents (for reconciliation, reporting, etc.) to augment Finance capability.

Core Competencies & Behaviors:

• Strategic Thinking - Connects dots across business, systems, and outcomes; anticipates needs and plans for scale
• Technical Leadership - Demonstrates depth across tools, payment