Senior Finance Manager

The Microsoft Strategy and Investment Optimization (MSIO) finance team is an exciting and fast-evolving team at the forefront of Microsoft’s Cloud-first strategy. This role is at the center of the Product Gross Margin Strategy to help build great cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI) services while influencing business models, levers to continuously drive gross margin growth and accelerate path to north star goal.  As a crucial member of the team, you will also support long term bets and drive competitive intelligence to keep Microsoft Cloud and AI ahead of competition, safeguarding shareholder interest.

We are looking for a Senior Finance Manager to enable a consistent, portfolio-based view and strategic approach to enable Microsoft’s goal to capture vast, long-lasting enterprise value by leading the AI platform wave. Role’s is at the center of the company’s vision to turn most advanced AI models into a computing platform in a structured way and critical to maximize Microsoft’s long-term AI growth and profitability.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

• Provide financial leadership and decision support to lead and drive long term efficiencies of the Microsoft AI Platform. Co-own and influence multi-year plan, focus, accountability, and incentives to accelerate gross margin expansion, unit cost reduction with clear state gate milestones.
• Own analytical frameworks, unit economic models, reporting insights and external benchmarks to define north star unit costs, gross margin (GM) for the AI platform. Accelerate platform scale, fungibility and utilization improvements to desired steady state. Influence leaders to develop engineering levers, execute while enabling feature, quality differentiation.
• Reduce platform unit costs and maximize return on invested capital by delivering leverage across the hardware, software, supply chain and infrastructure utilization. This includes driving benefit from new hardware generations in partnership with our vendors, software throughput improvements in partnership with OpenAI & other model provider.
• Effectively collaborate with leaders across multiple engineering orgs, Finance functions to develop efficiency roadmap, levers across AI Platform, CoPilots and enable execution with speed, and rigor and cross-org alignment to maximize Microsoft’s long term return on investment (ROI). Lead strategic financial and operational reviews, clearly communicate recommendations to executives.

Qualifications

Required / Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration, Accounting, Finance, Economics, Data Science or related field AND 4+ years’ experience in financial analysis, accounting, controllership or finance, or related field
  • OR Master's Degree in Business Administration, Accounting, Finance, Economics, Data Science or related field AND 2+ years’ experience in financial analysis, accounting, controllership or finance, or related field
  • OR equivalent experience.

 Preferred Qualifications:

• Demonstrated Experience in a High Tech and/or cloud, AI business focused on developing and driving long term efficiencies, reducing unit costs and maximizing ROI
• Demonstrated ability to form and influence cross-functional partnerships to deliver high-value projects both as an individual and through v-teams with business partnering skills
• Proven data and financial modeling capabilities and ability to work with financial systems
• Ability to communicate complex analysis in a simple way. Executive level oral and written communication skills.
• Proven leadership skills, with demonstrated results in proactively driving and delivering high value/high-impact project results through both individual and v-team efforts.
• Ability to drive best-in-class decision support in ambiguous environments. Partnering capabilities, with the ability to influence others without direct authority and appropriately push back when required.
• Comfort working at multiple altitudes, from strategic/high-level projects to detailed cost of goods sold (COGS) analysis
• Ability to handle multiple tasks under tight deadlines, quickly prioritize for impact and the resourcefulness to deliver<