Director, FP&A and AI Finance

What You'll Do:

Financial Planning & Forecasting
• Drive the annual budget process across all channels and departments, ensuring alignment with strategic priorities and operational plans.
• Lead the monthly forecast process, proactively identifying opportunities and risks and communicating them clearly to senior leadership.
• Support fleet management with financial analysis, including ROIC analysis on capital investments and new store decisions.
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 and continuously improves financial infrastructure.
Cross-Functional Partnership
• 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 & Development
• Build, lead, and develop an efficient, high-performing FP&A team — setting clear expectations, managing workflow, and coaching team members to grow in their roles.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Finance or a related field.
• 10+ years of progressively responsible FP&A experience, including multiple full budget cycles.
• 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.
• Direct FP&A experience in an omnichannel retail environment — supporting both physical store and ecommerce P&Ls.
• Strong command of corporate finance and accounting principles, with the ability to move comfortably between the P&L, Balance Sheet, and Statement of Cash Flows and explain complex concepts to non-financial audiences.
• Advanced proficiency with Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint).
• Proven ability to build complex financial models from scratch and bring financial dimension to ambiguous business problems.
• Track record of building and developing high-performing teams, with strong workflow management and ability to keep deliverables on track across a team.
• Rigorous attention to accuracy, with the ability to put processes in place that ensure financial information is presented correctly across the team.
• Excellent presentation and communication skills, with experience leading large group meetings and presenting to senior leadership.
• Intensely curious and proactive — 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.
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior leadership decisions and drive tangible outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications:

• MBA and/or CPA preferred.
• Experience evaluating, implementing, or improving financial planning and reporting systems (e.g., Adaptive, Anaplan, NetSuite Planning).

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.
• Strategic Visibility: As the finance leader for Sur La Table, you will present directly to the brand's CFO and senior leadership team — your analysis and recommendations will shape real investment decisions across stores, ecommerce, and culinary programming.
• AI at the Frontier of Finance: This role puts you at the leading edge of how FP&A functions are being rebuilt. You will have the mandate and the resources to deploy AI-driven automation in a real business environment — building a body of work that is genuinely differentiated.
• Full Ownership: You will own the budget, the forecast, the team, and the transformation agenda. There is no one above you in this function on a day-to-day basis — you set the standard and drive the outcomes.
• Competitive Benefits: Paid time off policies, 401(k) match, medical/dental/vision and a variety of supplemental policies, and employee discounts across our portfolio of brands including Sur La Table cooking class perks.

Interview Process:

1. Recruiter Screen: A conversation with our recruiting team to align on the role, your background, and mutual fit.
2. AI & Finance Assessment: A short take-home challenge to understand how you approach financial modeling and AI-driven workflow design.
3. Hiring Manager Interview: A deep-dive conversation with the Sur La Table CFO focused on your FP&A leadership experience, AI finance work, and strategic thinking.
4. Leadership Panel: In-person or virtual interviews with Sur La Table and Finance leadership, exploring cross-functional collaboration and your vision for the FP&A function.
5. Reference Checks: Conducted in parallel with the final stages where possible.
6. Offer: We move quickly for the right candidate.