Financial Analyst

📋 Description

• • Serve as the primary finance business partner to multiple internal departments, owning the full-cycle financial planning process for indirect spending areas. You will translate complex financial data into clear narratives that empower department heads to make confident, data-driven decisions.
• • Build and defend annual operating budgets, quarterly forecasts, and rolling 12-month outlooks. Partner with engineering, research, and administrative leaders to challenge assumptions, surface risks, and identify efficiency opportunities that keep Draper’s mission-critical programs on track.
• • Lead the capital-planning workflow for your assigned departments: solicit requests, rank competing priorities using ROI and strategic-alignment criteria, and present findings to FP&A leadership. Once approved, monitor spend, update forecasts, and flag scope or timing changes before they become surprises.
• • Design and automate recurring dashboards and executive-level reports that distill thousands of transactions into concise KPIs. Your visualizations will be used by senior leadership during board meetings, program reviews, and funding-agency briefings.
• • Own month-end data integrity for your departments—reconciling PeopleSoft and Adaptive entries, tracing variances back to source documents, and ensuring every dollar is explainable. Your attention to detail protects Draper’s reputation with government auditors and sponsors.
• • Conduct deep-dive ad-hoc analyses—pricing scenarios for new research proposals, cost-to-complete studies for multi-year contracts, or what-if models for emerging technologies. Translate findings into actionable recommendations that can shift millions in spending and accelerate innovation timelines.
• • Champion continuous improvement: identify manual processes ripe for automation, pilot new FP&A tools (Tableau, SQL, Power BI), and share best practices across the 15-person finance team. Your curiosity directly reduces cycle time and frees analysts to focus on insight rather than data wrangling.
• • Collaborate daily with program managers, scientists, and engineers who speak in acronyms and technical specs. Your ability to translate between finance jargon and engineering reality builds trust and ensures budgets reflect true technical risk and opportunity.
• • Present results in forums ranging from one-on-one coaching sessions with first-time budget owners to formal briefings for the CFO and CEO. Your storytelling skills turn spreadsheets into strategic decisions.
• • Maintain strict compliance with federal cost-accounting standards (FAR, DFARS, CAS) and Draper’s internal controls. Your work underpins the company’s ability to win and retain classified and unclassified contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
• • Support cross-functional initiatives such as indirect-rate optimization, facilities cost allocation, and strategic sourcing. Your analytical horsepower helps Draper reinvest savings into next-generation R&D.
• • Embrace Draper’s culture of multidisciplinary innovation—attend technical seminars, tour labs, and engage with subject-matter experts so your financial models reflect real-world physics, biology, and engineering constraints.