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Location: Huntsville, AL / Atlanta, GA
Department: Finance / Financial Planning & Analysis
Reports To: VP, Finance
Leadership Scope: Finance leaders and professionals supporting FP&A, business intelligence, reporting, financial systems, analytics, and related finance capabilities
Position Summary
ADTRAN is seeking a strategic, highly collaborative Senior Director of Finance to provide leadership across Financial Planning & Analysis, business performance management, financial systems and analytics, and finance transformation.
This role will serve as a key partner to the VP of Finance, CFO, and senior business leaders, connecting financial performance, operational drivers, strategic priorities, and resource allocation to improve business decision-making and long-term financial performance.
The Senior Director will lead and develop a team of finance leaders and professionals responsible for planning, forecasting, management reporting, business partnership, and financial analytics. The successful candidate will bring both strategic leadership and a builder mentality, establishing scalable processes and clear accountability while modernizing how Finance uses data, systems, automation, and artificial intelligence.
This leader must be equally comfortable discussing business performance with executives, challenging financial assumptions, developing talent, and working with teams to solve complex planning, reporting, data, and process issues.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Financial Leadership & Executive Decision Support
- Serve as a trusted financial advisor to the VP of Finance, CFO, and senior leadership, providing objective financial insights and recommendations that support strategic and operational decisions.
- Translate financial and operational performance into clear executive-level narratives identifying underlying business drivers, risks, opportunities, and required actions.
- Support strategic planning, resource allocation, investment decisions, and enterprise financial priorities.
- Develop financial frameworks and scenario analyses that help leadership evaluate alternative strategies and business decisions.
- Provide appropriate financial challenge to business assumptions and ensure decisions incorporate a fact-based view of financial and operational implications.
- Support executive leadership, Board, and other senior management reviews with clear, accurate, decision-oriented financial analysis and materials.
Enterprise Planning, Forecasting & Performance Management
- Provide leadership and governance for the annual operating plan, long-range planning, rolling forecasts, scenario planning, and recurring performance-management processes.
- Establish consistent planning methodologies, assumptions, calendars, governance, and accountability across the organization.
- Advance a driver-based planning model linking operating expenses, workforce, capital expenditures, cash, and other key operational drivers.
- Improve forecasting effectiveness through disciplined assumptions, risk and opportunity management, scenario analysis, forecast validation, and post-forecast reviews.
- Lead monthly and quarterly performance management processes, ensuring leadership understands not only variances to plan or forecast but also why performance changed and what actions should follow.
- Develop consistent KPIs and performance-management frameworks that connect financial outcomes with underlying business drivers.
Business Partnership & Operational Finance
- Lead the Finance partnership model across key business functions, including Sales, Operations, Supply Chain, Engineering, Product Management, Human Resources, Corporate Accounting, and other functional organizations.
- Ensure Finance is proactively involved in business decisions rather than functioning solely as a reporting organization.
- Support business leaders in evaluating investments, cost initiatives, workforce decisions, and resource trade-offs.
- Drive stronger financial accountability by establishing clear ownership for assumptions, financial commitments, risks, opportunities, and corrective actions.
- Connect operational metrics and financial results to identify the root causes of performance and potential improvement opportunities.
Finance Transformation, Technology, Analytics & AI
- Define and execute a roadmap for a more modern, scalable, technology-enabled FP&A organization.
- Drive standardization and automation across forecasting, budgeting, management reporting, variance analysis, financial modeling, and recurring analytical processes.
- Provide leadership for financial planning and reporting platforms, including SAP and SAP Analytics Cloud, and strengthen Finance's partnership with Information Technology around financial systems and data.
- Establish appropriate governance for financial data, reporting hierarchies, financial models, master data, system changes, and reporting definitions.
- Expand the use of business intelligence, workflow automation, advanced analytics, generative AI, agentic AI, and other emerging technologies where they can improve Finance productivity and decision support.
- Reduce dependence on manual spreadsheets and repetitive data preparation by creating scalable reporting, analytics, and planning solutions.
- Measure transformation outcomes through metrics such as forecast accuracy, planning cycle time, reporting cycle time, data quality, automation, adoption, and reduction of manual activities.
Financial Reporting, Controls & Governance
- Ensure FP&A reporting and analysis are accurate, consistent, timely, and supported by appropriate financial controls and governance.
- Partner closely with Corporate Accounting to maintain alignment between management reporting, financial planning, accounting results, and company policies.
- Support public-company financial requirements, quarterly and annual reporting cycles, internal controls, and audit-related activities as appropriate.
- Establish clear standards and processes for changes to financial reporting, planning methodologies, models, and systems.
Workforce Planning & Resource Allocation
- Lead the financial framework for enterprise workforce planning in partnership with Human Resources and business leadership.
- Ensure workforce plans are integrated with financial forecasts, organizational priorities, productivity expectations, and longer-term strategic objectives.
- Establish consistent approaches to headcount, compensation, hiring, attrition, vacancies, organizational changes, and workforce scenario modeling.
- Improve leadership visibility into workforce cost drivers and related financial risks and opportunities.
Team Leadership & Organizational Development
- Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing team of Finance managers and professionals across multiple disciplines and geographies.
- Build organizational capabilities in financial analysis, systems, analytics, automation, business partnership, executive communication, and strategic decision support.
- Identify talent and capability gaps and develop appropriate hiring, development, succession, and knowledge-transfer plans.
- Create an environment that encourages curiosity, constructive challenge, continuous improvement, collaboration, and accountability.
- Foster strong collaboration across U.S. and international Finance teams and a global, matrixed organization.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, Business Administration, Mathematics, or a related discipline.
- 10+ years of progressive experience in FP&A, corporate finance, operational finance, or related disciplines, with significant leadership responsibility.
- Demonstrated experience leading managers and developing high-performing finance teams.
- Strong expertise in financial planning, forecasting, financial modeling, scenario analysis, performance management, and executive decision support.
- Proven ability to operate within a complex, global organization and influence senior leaders across multiple functions.
- Experience building, transforming, or significantly improving FP&A processes, systems, reporting, or operating models.
- Strong understanding of the connection between financial results and operational drivers, including revenue, margin, operating expenses, workforce, capital expenditures, and cash.
- Demonstrated ability to translate complex financial and operational information into clear recommendations for senior executives.
- Advanced experience with enterprise ERP, financial planning, reporting, business intelligence, and analytical technologies.
- Excellent leadership, executive communication, stakeholder-management, organizational, and problem-solving capabilities.
- Ability to operate effectively in an evolving environment, bring structure to ambiguity, establish priorities, and drive execution across teams.
Preferred Qualifications
- MBA, CPA, CMA, or other relevant advanced degree or professional certification.
- Experience within a publicly traded global company.
- Experience in telecommunications, networking, technology, hardware, software, manufacturing, or another complex product-based business.
- Experience supporting global operations across the U.S. and Europe.
- Strong knowledge of SAP and SAP Analytics Cloud, including planning, analytics, reporting, financial data structures, and integration.
- Demonstrated practical application of generative AI, agentic AI, machine learning, or intelligent automation within Finance.
- Experience leading finance transformation, systems implementation, reporting modernization, or FP&A operating-model redesign.
- Experience supporting Board and executive-level financial presentations and decision processes.
