Lead Finance Business Partner (Services & Value Engineering)

Celonis is the trusted platform to industrialize Enterprise AI. At our core is the Celonis Context Model — which combines process data, business knowledge, and intelligence into a living digital twin of the enterprise that AI can actually understand, turning AI's operational blind spots into operational clarity. World's leading companies trust Celonis and its global ecosystem of partners to make their AI agents, people, systems, and processes work together, achieving transformational outcomes. We believe there's a massive opportunity to unlock global productivity and sustainability by giving AI the context to understand how every business process really works. Join our mission to make processes work for people, companies, and the planet. The Team: The Finance organization at Celonis is a strategic partner to our business, responsible for steering growth, profitability, and capital allocation across the company. Within Finance, the Go-To-Market (GTM) Finance team partners closely with the GTM executive leadership (Sales, Value Engineering, Marketing, Services, Partner & Ecosystem) to drive predictable, efficient growth and to ensure financial discipline in every aspect of our go-to-market engine. The GTM Finance team is critical to Celonis’ successful go-to-market execution and operates in a highly visible environment to executive leadership. The goals and objectives of the GTM Finance team include: • Guiding and supporting executive GTM leadership to achieve their operational & financial objectives • Providing objective, data-driven insights that assist in strategic decision making • Acting as a trusted advisor and advocate to the GTM leadership • Developing and operating relevant KPI measurement frameworks to help steering business performance • Contributing to drive the overall financial success of Celonis The Role: As Lead Finance Business Partner (reporting into the VP, GTM Finance), you will go beyond traditional FP&A to act as a strategic advisor to the leaders of our Services and Value Engineering organizations. You will own the financial modeling, delivery economics, and operational metrics that drive services gross margin, utilization, and value-selling efficiency. The ideal candidate understands that Professional Services is the accelerator for customer time-to-value and a lever on margin, and that Value Engineering is critical to winning and expanding enterprise deals — and that both must be steered with disciplined cost, capacity, and ROI management. The work you’ll do: Strategic Financial Partnership • Advisory: Serve as the primary financial co-pilot to the Services and Value Engineering leadership • Margin Optimization: Own the Gross Margin modeling for the Services and Value Engineering organizations, identifying levers to optimize delivery costs without sacrificing customer satisfaction. • Investment ROI: Evaluate the financial impact and ROI of headcount additions, tools, and strategic initiatives (e.g., insourcing vs. subcontracting delivery capacity, or scaling the VE coverage model). Planning, Forecasting & Capacity Modeling • Capacity Planning: Partner with Services and VE leadership to challenge and optimize their capacity and utilization models — stress-testing assumptions, identifying efficiency levers, and ensuring hiring and subcontractor use stay aligned with pipeline, bookings, and delivery backlog. • Budgeting: Lead the annual budgeting and monthly forecasting cycles for headcount, program spend, and variable compensation/bonuses for assigned departments. • Revenue Forecasting: Partner with Services leadership to forecast professional services revenue recognition based on project milestones, backlog, and book-to-burn ratios. SaaS Metrics & Operational Analytics • Drive Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Define, track, and analyze critical operational and financial metrics The qualifications you need: • Experience: 8+ years of experience in FP&A, corporate finance, or strategic finance, with at least 5 years specifically supporting Services organizations at a B2B SaaS or technology company. • Business Partnering: 5+ years experience working work executive leadership aligning operational execution with financial impacts • Education: Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or a quantitative field. MBA or CFA is a plus. • SaaS Acumen: Deep understanding of SaaS unit economics, revenue recognition rules • Financial Modeling: Elite Excel/financial modeling skills; ability to build complex, dynamic capacity and utilization models from scratch. • Systems Familiarity: Experience with enterprise tools such as Pigment, Salesforce and Workday Soft Skills & Competencies "The Translator Effect" The ideal candidate must be able to translate complex financial data into actionable operational strategies for non-finance leaders, and conversely, translate operational realities into financial impacts for the CFO. • Influence without authority: Proven ability to challenge senior executives constructively and back up recommendations with data. • Agility: Comfortable navigating ambiguity in a fast-paced, high-growth enterprise environment. • Communication: Exceptional storytelling skills; ability to distill massive data sets into executive summaries. What Success Looks Like in Year 1 • First 90 days: Establish trust with GTM leaders, audit current capacity models for the customer organization, and take ownership of the monthly variance reporting. • First 6 months: Stand up a subcontractor spend and PO-governance model that gives Finance clear visibility into delivery cost and margin leakage, and establish a margin / utilization review cadence with Services and VE leadership using Ops's utilization data to challenge the plan and surface optimization levers. • First year: Successfully co-pilot the annual planning process, driving a measurable improvement in Services gross margins and optimizing headcount ratio. What