Director, FP&A and AI Finance

What You'll Do:

Financial Planning & Forecasting
• Drive the annual budget process across all channels and departments.
• Lead the monthly forecast process, proactively identifying opportunities and risks.
• Support fleet management with financial analysis, including ROIC analysis on capital investments.
AI & Process Transformation
• Lead AI-driven process transformation across the FP&A function — prototyping and deploying automated workflows, agent-based solutions, and always-on reporting tools that reduce manual work and accelerate insight delivery.
• Leverage technology to evaluate and extract data that informs decision-making.
Business Partnership & Analysis
• Develop strong partnerships with business leaders to understand key operational drivers and deliver clear, actionable financial insights.
• Partner with Business Development to provide financial modeling and analysis on new business opportunities.
Team Leadership
• Build, lead, and develop an efficient, high-performing FP&A team.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Finance or a related field.
• 10+ years of progressively responsible FP&A experience, including multiple full budget cycles with clear perspective on what works and how to guide an organization through the process on schedule.
• Hands-on AI experience applied within finance workflows — concrete wins such as building automated reporting pipelines, deploying agent-based tools (e.g., n8n, Claude Code, ChatGPT), or creating custom solutions that replaced manual FP&A processes. You can walk us through exactly what you built and the business impact it had.
• Strong command of corporate finance and accounting principles, with the ability to translate complex concepts clearly for non-financial audiences. You move comfortably between the P&L, Balance Sheet, and Statement of Cash Flows and understand how they interact.
• Advanced proficiency with Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint).
• Direct FP&A experience in an omnichannel retail environment — supporting both physical store and ecommerce P&Ls. Candidates without meaningful retail finance experience are unlikely to hit the ground running in this role.
• Analytically and quantitatively strong — you have built complex financial models from scratch and can bring financial dimension to ambiguous problems.
• Track record of building and developing high-performing teams, with strong workflow management and the ability to keep deliverables on track across a team.
• Demonstrated accuracy with processes in place to ensure financial information is presented correctly across your team.
• Excellent presentation and communication skills, with experience leading larger group meetings and presenting to senior leadership.
• Intensely curious with a proactive approach — you dig deep to understand business processes, uncover solutions to problems, and connect financial information to operations.
• Player-coach leadership style — equally comfortable building models and synthesizing analysis as delegating and developing team members. This role will have you rolling up your sleeves and producing work, not just overseeing it.
• Demonstrated ability to influence and drive leadership decisions and tangible outcomes.
• Experience utilizing and improving financial planning and reporting systems.

Preferred Qualifications:

• MBA and/or CPA designation.
• Experience with enterprise financial planning platforms (e.g., Adaptive Insights, Anaplan, Workday Financials).

Why Join:

The people who do best here are builders. They take ownership, move fast, and want to see the direct impact of their work.
• Direct Impact on the Business: You will work directly with the Sur La Table CFO and brand leadership, with your analysis and recommendations shaping real investment decisions, fleet strategy, and business development — not sitting in a deck that never gets read.
• AI Finance Frontier: This role is explicitly designed to push the FP&A function forward with AI and automation. You will have the mandate and the tools to build things that don't exist yet inside the finance org, and your work will set the standard for how FP&A operates across the portfolio.
• Full Ownership of a Complex Function: You will own the full planning and forecasting cycle for an omnichannel retailer with stores, ecommerce, and a cooking education business — no hand-holding, no committee sign-off on every decision, just clear accountability and the authority to drive it.
• Competitive Benefits: Paid time off policies, RRSP match, medical/dental/vision and a variety of supplemental policies, and employee discounts at our portfolio companies.

Interview Process:

1. Recruiter Screen: A conversation with our recruiting team to cover your background, the role, and what you are looking for in your next move.
2. AI Finance Challenge: A short take-home exercise so we can see how you approach automation or financial modeling problems hands-on.
3. Deep-Dive Interviews: Structured interviews with the CFO and key business stakeholders focused on your FP&A leadership experience, AI finance work, and how you operate as a player-coach.
4. In-Person Interview: A final on-site conversation with senior leadership.
5. Reference Checks: Conducted in parallel with the final stages where possible.
6. Offer: We move quickly for the right candidate.