At SolarWinds, we’re a people-first company. Our purpose is to enrich the lives of the people we serve—including our employees, customers, shareholders, partners, and communities. Join us in our mission to help customers accelerate business transformation with simple, powerful, and secure solutions.

The ideal candidate thrives in an innovative, fast-paced environment and is collaborative, accountable, ready, and empathetic. We’re looking for individuals who believe they can accomplish more as a team and create lasting growth for themselves and others. We hire based on attitude, competency, and commitment. Solarians are ready to advance our world-class solutions in a fast-paced environment and accept the challenge to lead with purpose. If you’re looking to build your career with an exceptional team, you’ve come to the right place. Join SolarWinds and grow with us!

Your role

You will stand up product and engineering FP&A as a discipline: product-line and customer-level margin analytics, the economics behind pricing and packaging decisions (including our AI offerings), and a standardized investment-case and return-tracking process for new product launches and acquisitions. You will partner daily with product management, engineering, pricing, and revenue operations, and you will present your work at the executive level.

This is a role for a finance leader who is equally credible in a pricing debate, an engineering capacity review, and a board-quality readout — someone who builds durable processes, not one-off analyses.

What you’ll do

Own product & engineering financial planning. The R&D budget and forecast, headcount and capacity planning by product line, and the monthly operating rhythm with the CTO and CPO organizations.
Build product and customer margin analytics. Contribution margin by product line and customer segment, with the upstream data requirements defined and owned: cost attribution for hosting and cloud infrastructure, and unit-cost instrumentation for AI features (inference and compute costs by feature, tier, and customer).
Be the finance engine behind AI pricing & packaging. Partner with product and pricing on the economics of our AI offerings: unit cost modeling, gross-margin guardrails, freemium and tier boundaries, usage and consumption analytics, and the measurement design for pricing tests.
Standardize investment cases and ROI. Build and run the company’s process for evaluating new product launches and acquisitions: a one-page investment-case standard (market sizing, attach and pricing assumptions, cost and capacity requirements, margin at steady state, kill criteria), pre-launch baselines, and post-launch scorecards at defined checkpoints.
Run scenario analysis that changes decisions. Fast, credible modeling of build/buy/partner options, portfolio trade-offs across product lines, and downside cases — sized at the level of precision the decision actually needs.
Track returns honestly. Adoption, attach, ARR contribution, retention effects, and margin impact for shipped investments — with disciplined attribution and a clear line between measured results and directional estimates.
Partner across the house. Accounting on R&D cost classification and software capitalization; revenue operations and business applications on usage and telemetry data; corporate FP&A on how product-line plans roll into the company plan.
Build the team. Hire, develop, and lead a small, high-caliber product & engineering FP&A team, starting with a senior analyst.

What you bring

10+ years of progressive FP&A experience in software/SaaS, including several years leading R&D, product, or engineering finance as a true business partner to technical executives.
Pricing and unit-economics fluency: you have modeled cost-to-serve, contribution margin, and pricing/packaging options for subscription software, and you can explain the trade-offs to a GTM audience without a spreadsheet open.
Investment-case and M&A experience: you have built business cases for product launches and/or acquisition models, and — more importantly — tracked what actually happened afterward.
Comfort with data at scale: whether hands-on or through AI-assisted tooling, you can define data requirements for engineering and analytics teams and sanity-check what comes back — you know what a clean number looks like and what it took to get there.
Executive presence: concise, structured, numbers-first communication; you have presented to C-level leaders and can hold a position under challenge.
Builder’s temperament: you create templates, cadences, and standards that outlive you, and you would rather instrument a baseline than argue about credit later.

Nice to have

Direct experience with the economics of AI products — inference cost modeling, consumption pricing, credits/metering models, or AI COGS design.
Experience in private-equity-backed or public software companies with rigorous board reporting.
Familiarity with engineering operating metrics (capacity planning, allocation frameworks) and how finance uses them respectfully.
Experience supporting a subscription or consumption pricing transition.

What success looks like in the first 12 months

A trusted operating rhythm with the CTO and CPO organizations, with product-line budgets, capacity plans, and forecasts that leadership uses to make allocation decisions.
A first product-line contribution-margin view in production, with AI feature unit costs instrumented and reported monthly.
The investment-case and post-launch scorecard process adopted for new launches, with baselines captured before builds begin.
Finance is at the table for AI pricing decisions with cost and margin analytics the room trusts.

SolarWinds is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. SolarWinds will consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, disability, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.

All applications are treated in accordance with the SolarWinds Privacy Notice: https://www.solarwinds.com/applicant-privacy-notice

Sr Director Finance

Job Description