Global Director of Finance

Job Title: Global Director of Finance

Reports to: Global Managing Director

Location: San Francisco, CA

Salary Range: $220,000 – $240,000 pa, depending on experience

Updated: January 2025

About CPI

Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) is an analysis and advisory organization with deep expertise in finance and policy. Our mission is to help governments, businesses, and financial institutions drive economic growth while addressing climate change. Our vision is to build a sustainable, resilient, and inclusive global economy. CPI has six offices around the world in Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

CPI is known as a leader in tracking sustainable investment trends, identifying innovative business models, and supporting the solutions that can drive the transition to a low-carbon, climate-resilient, inclusive economy. We are unique in our focus on finance, our ability to get the right people to the table, and our analytical rigor.

About the role/Position Summary

The Global Director of Finance is a strategic leader and key advisor to the CEO, playing a pivotal role in driving CPI’s financial success and advancing its mission. This position oversees all aspects of finance, budgeting, auditing, and financial compliance, ensuring that financial practices are efficient, aligned with CPI’s strategic goals, and continuously evolving to meet organizational needs.

Reporting directly to the CEO, the Global Director of Finance leads a team of finance professionals across the U.S. and globally. They collaborate closely with Operations, the Senior Management Team, and other key stakeholders to ensure financial integrity, operational efficiency, and long-term sustainability.

Key responsibilities

Strategic leadership: Together with other senior leaders, the Global Director of Finance plays a critical role in shaping and executing CPI’s strategic vision.

• Contributing to Strategy Development – Support the development of CPI’s annual and long-term strategic plans, ensuring financial alignment with organizational goals.
• Driving Operational Excellence – Oversee the execution of financial strategy, ensuring efficiency, effectiveness, and long-term sustainability.
• Optimizing Resources – Allocate and manage finance team resources to maximize impact and organizational success.
• Problem-Solving & Innovation – Identify and address financial challenges while leveraging opportunities to enhance CPI’s financial health.
• Values-Driven Leadership – Embody and promote CPI’s core values: collaboration, honesty, rigor, and leadership in all aspects of the role.

Accounting: The Global Director of Finance oversees all accounting activities including accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll processes, revenue recognition, and bank reconciliations. The director is also responsible for ensuring effective cash flow management; and managing CPI investments, consistent with Board guidance. They work closely with and support the CPI Board Treasurer.

Compliance: The director coordinates the preparation of all required tax returns and manages the auditing process and communicating the results to internal stakeholders. They are responsible for delivering a clean annual audit, and collaborating with Operations to ensure compliance across departments and offices.

Team Management: The director cultivates and leads a high-performing and high-impact team, including the central Finance team, and regional finance and accounting staff. They ensure all financial team members have clarity about their roles and follow nonprofit accounting best practices and requirements for accurate and compliant data

Implement and Strengthen Financial Systems: The director plans and implements quality assurance and quality control procedures over financial transactions and financial reporting to maintain internal controls. They guide the use of CPI’s comprehensive accounting software system Intacct including collaborating with IT on system enhancements. They coach and educate all staff across CPI about the finance function and the need for financial processes and constraints, as well as ensure that shared systems and practices are understood, adapted, and institutionalized across the organization.

Grants & Contracts Management: The director reviews proposal budgets valued at $300,000 and contract and grant agreements valued $300,000 as well as those that may present unusual risk to the organization.

Travel to CPI offices globally, as required.

Qualifications and Experience

Required

• Qualified accountant with significant experience in progressively responsible finance roles in a dynamic and entrepreneurial social sector organization. A bachelor’s degree is required with a relevant advanced degree and/or a CPA certification preferred.

• Functional expertise: a successful track record of rigorous financial management—along with very strong accounting, compliance, audit, and financial analysis skills—is essential. The Global Director of Finance must have an understanding of nonprofit accounting practices and regulations, including the 990-tax return process, revenue recognition, and current requirements for determining proper classification. Prior experience holding final responsibility for the quality and content of all financial data, reporting, and audits.

Competencies and Personal Attributes

• Strategic and systems orientation: The director is both detail oriented and a strategic systems thinker who has the ability to pivot from day-to-day accounting to high level financial strategy work, and the flexibility to take on new challenges as CPI grows. With the ability to actively strengthen internal systems and processes to keep pace with the team’s vision and ambitions and is committed to continuous improvement. The director has strong fluency in relevant technology.

• Collaborative leadership: The director is an approachable expert— they enjoy sharing knowledge and are patient in meeting people where they are and bringing others along. The combination of financial acumen and interpersonal skills build the trust and confidence of all staff and the Board of Directors and are able to influence broadly and successfully across CPI. They bring a positive, professional, and proactive approach to problem solving, to effectively support the team’s needs, questions, and challenges. They have demonstrated success translating financial processes to lay audiences and experience developing financial and accounting controls that are user friendly to ensure that CPI’s headquarters, division and country offices have the support they need on compliance, financial systems and reporting, donor reporting, and financial questions. Demonstrated success navigating multi-cultural work environments that have distributed, international, and remote teams will be beneficial.

• High standards and integrity: The director must be trustworthy, with impeccable integrity and ethics. They routinely demonstrate sound judgment along with the highest levels of confidentiality, discretion and tact.

• Attention to detail and accuracy are critical and the director has high standards for accurate and complete work product.

• Embraces CPI’s mission and embodies CPI values of collaboration, honesty, rigor and leadership.

Position details

CPI is recruiting for a full-time position in our San Francisco, Washington DC or Delhi office.

CPI has adopted a flexible working policy whereby staff are able to mix working remotely with 1 day per week in the CPI office.

CPI offers an excellent and competitive compensation and benefits package.

To Apply

Please submit your CV and a compelling cover letter, setting out why you think you could make an impact in this role by Friday 28th February 2025.

Due to the importance of this role to our CPI projects we are looking to appoint quickly and will be reviewing applications as they are submitted, therefore interested candidates are advised to submit your application at the earliest convenience. We reserve the right to remove this advert, dependent on the level of response received.

Climate Policy Initiative is an equal opportunity employer and committed to improving diversity, equity, and inclusion within our organization. We work hard to create and maintain a supportive and inclusive environment where all individuals can maximise their full potential. Our CPI teams reflect a variety of backgrounds, talents, perspectives, and experiences. Our strong commitment to a diversity and inclusion is evident through our focus on attracting and retaining staff based on skills and merit.