Director, Finance AI & Automation

About Us 

SharkNinja is a global product design and technology company, with a diversified portfolio of 5-star rated lifestyle solutions that positively impact people’s lives in homes around the world. Powered by two trusted, global brands, Shark and Ninja, the company has a proven track record of bringing disruptive innovation to market and developing one consumer product after another has allowed SharkNinja to enter multiple product categories, driving significant growth and market share gains. Headquartered in Needham, Massachusetts with more than 4,100 associates, the company’s products are sold at key retailers, online and offline, and through distributors around the world. 

AI at SharkNinja

At SharkNinja, we’re building an AI-native culture. We’re not waiting for the future; we’re creating it. Our people are expected to experiment boldly, adopt new tools, and continuously raise what’s possible to create meaningful impact for our consumers. If you believe the best way to do your job hasn’t been invented yet, you’ll fit right in.

The Finance organization at SharkNinja is a strategic partner that enables innovation, accelerates growth, and drives outstanding business performance. Working closely with Finance partners to support Product Development, Engineering, Supply Chain, Operations, and Commercial teams, providing the insights and financial leadership that enable SharkNinja to deliver disruptive, consumer first innovation.

As the Director, Finance AI & Automation, you will own the design, build and deployment of the AI capability inside a global Finance organization at a nearly $8 billion consumer products company. This is not an advisory or program management role. You will personally build, production AI agents and automations that change how Finance plans, closes, controls, and decides. You will be deployed across the whole Finance estate, FP&A, Accounting, Internal Audit and SOX, Tax, and Treasury.

SharkNinja measures this work in gross margin dollars, headcount productivity, and enterprise value. It is not measured in hours saved. You will be expected to size, commit to, and deliver against outcomes in those terms.

You will also own how the capability scales safely. As Finance moves from a handful of agents to an estate of them, you will build and run the agent register, the control tiering that goes with it, and the standards that keep an automated process auditable in a SOX environment. You will partner with Internal Audit, the Chief Accounting Officer, and Digital Technology so that speed and control are not a trade.

Success in this role requires someone who is Rarely Satisfied, unwilling to accept that a process is as good as it can get simply because it is the process. You must excel at Communicating for Impact, translating both financial and technical complexity into a clear recommendation for executive leadership, and you must embrace the Outrageously Extraordinary mindset through innovation, confidence, urgency, and a relentless drive for edge.

Responsibilities

• Help drive the Finance AI and automation roadmap end to end, from opportunity identification through production deployment, adoption, and measured business outcome.
• Personally build agents and automations. This role stays hands on at the Director level and is expected to ship, not only to direct.
• Set and deliver the value case for the capability in gross margin dollars, headcount productivity, or enterprise value. Never in hours saved.
• Deploy the team across FP&A, Accounting, Internal Audit and SOX, Tax, and Treasury, prioritizing by financial impact rather than by which function asks loudest.
• Partner with the SVP, FP&A, the Chief Accounting Officer, the VP, Internal Audit, and Tax and Treasury leadership to identify and sequence the highest value use cases in each area.
• Build and own the Finance agent register and control tiering framework, so that every agent in the estate has a named owner, a defined control classification, and evidence sufficient for internal and external audit.
• Establish the engineering standards for Finance built automation: version control, testing, change management, access control, data lineage, and human in the loop design where control requires it.
• Ensure every funded agent consumes governed financial dimensions rather than creating another private definition of a number.
• Partner with Digital Technology, Data, and external partners on platform selection, architecture, and integration into Oracle ERP, EPM, and the enterprise data estate.
• Assess build versus buy honestly, and be willing to recommend against a purchase when the differentiated answer is a build.
• Lead and develop a small team of highly technical finance professionals, and transfer capability into the wider organization.

Skills Required

Education & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative field required.
• MBA, CPA, CMA, or an advanced degree in a technical discipline preferred.
• 8 to 10 years of progressive experience, with a genuine blend of Finance and Technology. Candidates from a pure Finance background with no build experience, and candidates from a pure engineering background with no financial statement literacy, will not be successful in this role.
• Demonstrated experience owning financial processes end to end in one or more of FP&A, Accounting and close, Internal Audit or SOX, Tax, or Treasury, in a public company environment.
• Required: demonstrated, hands on expertise building and deploying AI agents and automations into production, with reference to specific systems you have built and the measured outcome they produced.
• Experience working inside a public company control environment, and the judgement to know when an automated process needs a human control and when it does not.
• Experience leading technical delivery, including managing or mentoring engineers, analysts, or a mixed team.
• Track record of quantifying and defending the financial impact of a technology investment to executive leadership.
• Experience working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, matrixed global organization.

Technical Skills

• AI agent design, build, and deployment, including agentic workflow orchestration and tool use
• Large language model application development, prompt and context engineering, evaluation, and guardrail design
• Claude Code or an equivalent agentic coding environment, at a level sufficient to build and ship, not only to consume
• Python and SQL
• Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A)
• Financial close, consolidation, and reporting
• Internal control design and SOX
• Data modelling, master data, and governed financial dimensions
• Systems integration and API design
• AI governance, model risk, and control tiering
• Business case development and value quantification
• Executive financial presentations

Preferred Tools & Technologies

• Claude, Claude Code, and the Anthropic API
• Oracle ERP and Oracle EPM or FCCS
• Palantir Foundry
• Snowflake
• Power BI, Tableau, or Domo
• Python, SQL, Git
• Microsoft Excel (Advanced), Power Query, Microsoft PowerPoint

Leadership Competencies

• Builder first. Credibility in this role comes from what you have shipped.
• Strategic thinker with genuine commercial and financial acumen, able to tell the difference between an interesting use case and a material one.
• Demonstrates Rarely Satisfied by continuously improving processes and challenging conventional thinking.
• Excellent at Communicating for Impact, able to hold a technical conversation with engineering and a P&L conversation with the CFO in the same hour.
• Believes Winning is a Team Sport, and measures success by capability that stays in the organization rather than by dependency on themselves.
• Operates with urgency while maintaining high quality decision making.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity, and comfortable being told an idea is not big enough and coming back with a bigger one.
• Strong coaching and talent development skills aligned with Director level expectations.