About the roleThis role sits in the Office of the CFO, and it is not a conventional finance role. Finance holds much of what IFS knows about itself: cost structure, unit economics, how the plan was built and where it has drifted. Most of the decisions that evidence should shape sit somewhere else, in Sales, Services, R&D and Operations. Connecting the two is the job.You will lead a small number of substantial cross-functional projects each year and advise on several more. The work moves between transformation and analysis: redesigning how we plan and allocate, building the models and reporting leadership needs to see the business clearly, designing operating models and governance that hold up in practice, and working out where AI genuinely changes how finance and its partner functions work.The portfolio changes with what the company needs. What stays constant is the shape of the problem. It crosses functions, nobody owns it yet, and the people involved do not start outagreeing. A meaningful part of the work runs through external consulting partners, so you will be directing teams you do not employ about as often as teams you do.Why this role?Many roles at this level are either functional ownership or advice. This is neither. You take a problem from framing through analysis, decision and implementation, and you stay with it long enough to find out whether it worked.You get direct access to the CFO and the executive team, a small team on your projects, and responsibility for outcomes rather than documents. IFS has grown quickly, organically and through acquisition, so there is real work to do on how the company plans, allocates and decides. This is not a tidy system to maintain.What you'll doYour responsibilities will include: Lead initiatives end to end. Frame the problem, build the workplan, run the analysis, drive to a decision with senior stakeholders and stay through implementation. You will not hand over a deck and move on. Diagnose how the business actually runs. Through interviews, workshops and time in the data, establish how a process really works rather than how it is documented, where cost and effort sit, and which decisions are being made on weak evidence or not being made at all. Design the future state. Process, structure, roles, governance and a transition plan someone can follow, built with the teams who have to live with it rather than presented to them. Connect finance, data and operations. Translate across financial logic, the data that describes the business and operational reality: cost structure to process design, forecast variance to capacity decisions, margin pressure to where the work actually happens. Work with Data and Technology teams so the numbers behind those links can be trusted. Improve the evidence behind decisions. Define the metrics, models and reporting leadership needs, retire what it does not, and make sure assumptions can be inspected and argued with. Scope and manage external consulting partners. Write the brief and scope of work, evaluate proposals, direct day-to-day delivery, hold external teams to a standard, integrate their output with internal work, control spend against the value delivered, and bring the knowledge back in house when the engagement ends. Lead blended teams. Run internal, cross-functional and third-party teams without formal authority over most of them. The role may carry direct reports over time. Shape where AI belongs in this work. Finance and its partner functions have no shortage of candidate use cases across planning, forecasting, close, procurement and workforce processes. The useful contribution is judgment: what is worth building, in what order, who owns it afterward, and where a human check has to stay. IFS holds its internal AI adoption to the same standard as the software it sells.In your first six months: take one significant cross-functional problem from framing to a decision the executive team has signed off, with an implementation plan and a named owner. Alongside it, produce a clear read on how one core planning or allocation process works today and what should change.
