Director, Financial Planning & Analysis

Who are we?

Sidewalk Labs is an urban innovation company working to make cities more sustainable and affordable for all. We create products, invest in new companies, and help plan innovative places around the world. Since our founding in 2015, we’ve grown into an organization of over 100 employees based primarily in New York City. Our cross-disciplinary team consists of experts from real estate, urban planning, government, finance, technology, and engineering, among other backgrounds.

We’ve launched innovative companies addressing urban mobility, next-generation infrastructure, and community-based healthcare, and invested in startups working on everything from robotic furniture to new forms of power delivery. We continue to work internally on projects such as factory-made mass timber construction that can improve housing affordability and sustainability, a digital master-planning tool designed to help developers and communities achieve shared objectives, an AI platform designed to help commercial buildings save energy, and a new approach to all-electric neighborhoods.

With the potential to catalyze and scale new models for sustainable and affordable growth, our work is both exciting and complex. We are working to achieve something unprecedented — help us build it!

What is the role?

The Director, Financial Planning and Analysis is a key role, reporting directly to our CFO, Holly Lim. The overall goal of the role is to work closely with other stakeholders across Sidewalk Labs to develop our financial strategy and to bring a finance mindset to all of our company initiatives. The Director of FP&A will play a critical role in providing valuable business insights that drive decision-making. In addition to owning P&L forecasting for the entire company and the monthly close partnership with accounting, the Director will work closely with the business units to develop insights and drive decisions that align with the constantly changing opportunities that the businesses have.

This is a highly visible role with the ability to directly impact key business decisions and financial outlook, and a great opportunity for someone who has strong quantitative skills, is well organized, and is able to manage multiple projects simultaneously. 

What You Will Achieve

After 3 months you will

• Have developed relationships throughout the company and spent time with each of the key stakeholder groups and individuals within those groups to get an understanding of each team’s go-to-market strategy and product development challenges
• Have articulated a view on the FP&A team structure, how that maps to the skills we have vs skills that we will want in 12 months 
• Have taken the lead on developing the framework, workstreams and key stakeholders for the 2022 plan

After 6 months you will

• Support our product and incubation teams by setting up models or frameworks that help teams prioritize spend decisions and optimize for their goals
• Develop a financial reporting package for each business with monthly reporting accessible by the business, including financial metrics (leading, lagging indicators). 
• Hire an additional team member 

After 12 months you will

• Have reviewed the current data management processes and data visualization across the company, and proposed the next iteration of those processes and systems and its implementation
• Drive financial and operational accountability at the team levels through finance business partnering, iterating on the allocation of corporate overhead costs to the respective businesses, and incorporating corporate services resource requirements in 2022 plans
• Drive corporate services productivity by partnering with the other corporate service leads to optimize its processes and systems

What We Expect

• Manage key FP&A processes, including budgeting, forecasting, R&Os, management reporting, and others.
• Set parameters for consolidation and provide consolidated financial tracking, analysis, commentary, and documents to our CFO and other key stakeholders to support key deliverables, working in close partnership with our product leads within the various business units.
• Develop, optimize, and standardize FP&A processes, including through coordination of automation opportunities and sharing of industry best practices.
• Bring outside perspective on the competitive environment in urban innovation, develop best practices for incubations and build your own network across early-stage technology companies.
• Support and drive the planning and implementation of a new enterprise-wide investment decisioning and capital allocation framework (business case process).
• Partner with colleagues at multiple levels and collaborate with cross-functional teams, including Corporate Development/M&A, Accounting, Business Operations, HR, and other central teams, to define and deliver solutions.
• Lead and continue to grow a high performing team.
• Bachelor's degree in finance, accounting, economics, business, or related field.
• 15+ years of relevant finance experience. 
• Strong passion for build and transformation, and experience evolving people, processes, and systems.
• Track record of collaborating in a matrixed finance organization, and driving coordination between central/corporate FP&A and division FP&A/Finance is required.
• Proven track record of leadership and the ability to drive results with limited guidance.
• Executive-friendly communication and financial storytelling skills, including in decks.
• Excellent project management skills, attention to detail, and the ability to prioritize efficiently in a fast-paced, high growth environment.
• Financial systems experience (Adaptive/Anaplan, NetSuite, etc).

We are very excited to hear from you.

Sidewalk Labs is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We actively seek applicants from underrepresented communities. Even if you are not 100% sure you are right for the role, please apply and we will be happy to consider your application. All employment is based on merit and business need, and we respond to each application we receive.