Group Functions Finance Partner – Technology (Product & R&D)

About the Role

We are hiring the first member of our new Group Functions Finance Partnering team: a Finance Partner for the Technology organisation. You will partner with a 1,000+ person Product & R&D organisation spanning China, Malaysia, Taiwan and Singapore — one of the Group's largest cost centres — working directly with the CTO and team leads on budgeting, headcount and resource planning, organisational and productivity analytics, and investment decisions, in collaboration with the Group's dedicated systems-cost team.

The heart of this role is answering three questions: what each technology team does and what it costs; how we measure whether a team is doing more or becoming more efficient; and by what rules next year's headcount and investment should be allocated. You will need to be equally comfortable deep in ticketing and organisational data and in the room with senior technology leaders.

Note: this is not a traditional Corporate FP&A or reporting-focused position. Direct experience supporting a Product & R&D / Engineering / Technology organisation is required.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the annual budget, rolling forecasts and long-range planning for the Product & R&D organisation; track actuals vs budget and explain variances and risks to management.

• Partner on headcount planning by team and by country, including the cost impact of location mix, hiring plans and organisational changes; build scenario models for headcount growth, project investment, cloud cost and re-organisation decisions.

• Develop a deep understanding of the technology organisation’s structure: each team’s functional scope, internal customers and cost composition, maintained as a team-level cost and headcount view.

• Work with technology leadership to establish how the organisation's investment and output are measured, and connect these measures to financial data for headcount and resource decisions.

• Identify efficiency topics in how the organisation is structured and invested, form hypotheses, validate them with data, and drive change with technology leaders.

• Collaborate with the Group's dedicated systems-cost team: this role owns the total departmental cost view and the people line; the systems-cost team owns vendor-level software/cloud/server detail; together produce the complete people × systems × projects view, including unit economics of trading infrastructure.

• Support investment and ROI analysis for key product and technology initiatives; translate roadmaps into financial forecasts and resource plans; track project spend against approved cases.

• Lead the monthly technology cost review for the CTO and team leads; build and continuously improve KPIs and management dashboards; support Group cost-allocation and expense-control processes, and work with Accounting on correct treatment of R&D spend, including the capitalisation boundary.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, Business or related discipline.

• 5+ years in FP&A / Finance Business Partnering / Business Finance, with proven experience directly supporting a Product, Engineering, R&D or Technology organisation (required).

• Background in internet, FinTech, SaaS, AI, trading platforms or large technology companies strongly preferred.

• Strong understanding of technology-organisation economics: R&D headcount, product roadmaps, cloud and infrastructure, software spend and technology vendors.

• Strong financial modelling, budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis and scenario planning skills.

• Plus: familiarity with engineering-productivity frameworks (DORA / SPACE / DX Core 4) or TBM / FinOps; working SQL / Power BI skills and comfort handling ticketing, repository or HR system extracts.

• Commercially minded and comfortable challenging assumptions and investment requests with evidence, while operating as a partner rather than a cost policeman; able to influence senior Product and Engineering stakeholders without formal authority.

• Fluency in both English and Chinese is required: day-to-day collaboration with Chinese-speaking engineering teams and bilingual reporting to management.