Job Overview:
The Executive Director, Finance Customer Facing is a senior finance leader at Fortrea, responsible for leading financial insight, partnership, and execution across customer facing finance activities. This role ensures strong financial stewardship across project economics, customer interactions, revenue recognition, and order to cash processes while elevating the strategic impact of finance in customer decision making.
This role is designed to shift finance from reactive reporting to proactive, value-focused partnership with project management and customer-facing teams. The Executive Director brings strong executive presence, commercial orientation and judgment, enabling improved project profitability, customer outcomes, and enterprise financial performance.
Summary of Responsibilities:
Customer Facing Financial Leadership
• Lead financial oversight and insight generation across customer-facing finance activities, including project profitability and customer negotiations and economics.
• Serve as the senior finance partner to full-service project delivery leadership, supporting informed resourcing, contracting, and delivery decisions.
• Ensure consistent application of financial standards across customer interactions and project level decision making.
Project Financial Analysis and Profitability
• Oversee ongoing project profitability analysis to drive transparency and timely insight into project performance.
• Partner with full-service project delivery teams to identify margin and execution risks, performance improvement opportunities, and corrective actions.
• Strengthen finance involvement throughout the project lifecycle, from point of winning a project opportunity through execution and close.
Revenue Recognition and Order to Cash Oversight
• Provide finance leadership for revenue recognition across the organization, in alignment with enterprise policies, applicable accounting standards and regulatory requirements.
• Oversee billing, collections, and order to cash activities, ensuring accuracy, timeliness, and customer-focused execution by leveraging customer touchpoints across the organization.
• Act as the primary finance interface with external supporting partners for transactional order to cash processes and optimization initiatives.
Project Financial Analysis (PFA) Organization Leadership and Upskilling
• Lead the PFA organization, ensuring strong alignment between customer needs, project delivery, and financial outcomes.
• Leverage and embed PFA capability building and upskilling, including financial acumen for project management, to enhance analytical rigor, customer partnership, and executive storytelling.
Executive Partnership and Influence
• Provide executive level financial insight that supports customer negotiations, portfolio decisions, and commercial strategy.
• Translate complex project and customer financial data into clear, actionable narratives for senior leadership.
• Influence enterprise finance priorities through collaboration with corporate, divisional, and strategic initiatives leaders across Finance.
Leadership and Talent Development
• Develop and lead a high performing customer facing finance team with strong business acumen and customer orientation.
• Mentor senior finance leaders and emerging talent, reinforcing a proactive, value added finance mindset.
Qualifications (Minimum Required):
Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or related field required. MBA or equivalent preferred.
CPA or experience in audit required.
15+ years of progressive finance leadership experience overseeing global teams, with significant exposure to customer facing/project finance or operational finance roles.
Experience (Minimum Required):
Demonstrated experience partnering with operational and / or customer facing leadership teams.
Strong background in project profitability analysis, revenue recognition, and order to cash processes.
Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and translate financial complexity into actionable executive insights.
Exceptional executive presence, communication, and judgment.
Preferred Qualifications Include:
Experience working within the CRO, life sciences, healthcare services, or similarly complex, project‑based global organizations.
Working knowledge of ASC 606 revenue recognition and its implications for forecasting, planning, and enterprise financial insight.
Experience operating in a public company environment, including exposure to SOX controls and executive or board‑level reporting.
Physical Demands / Work Environment:
Work is performed in an office environment with exposure to electrical office equipment.
This role requires candidates to reside within a commutable distance of our Durham, NC headquarters and to be able to visit the location on an as‑needed basis.
Physical Requirements:
Frequently stationary for 6-8 hours per day.
Repetitive hand movement of both hands with the ability to make fast, simple, repeated movements of the fingers, hands, and wrists.
Application deadline: May 15, 2026
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What We Do
Fortrea (Nasdaq: FTRE) is a leading global provider of clinical development and patient access solutions to the life sciences industry. We partner with emerging and large biopharmaceutical, medical device and diagnostic companies to drive healthcare innovation that accelerates life changing therapies to patients in need. Fortrea provides phase I-IV clinical trial management, clinical pharmacology, differentiated technology-enabled trial solutions and post-approval services. Fortrea’s solutions leverage three decades of experience spanning more than 20 therapeutic areas, a passion for scientific rigor, exceptional insights and a strong investigator site network. Our talented and diverse team working in more than 90 countries is scaled to deliver focused and agile solutions to customers globally. Learn more about how Fortrea is becoming a transformative force from pipeline to patient at Fortrea.com.
