Key Responsibilities:
- Financial Planning: Support annual IT budget planning and help translate IT and business needs into clear budget line items for North American entities (WEI and Wattpad).
- Variance Analysis: Track monthly and quarterly IT spend and prepare budget vs. actual reports, highlighting key variances and trends.
- Forecasting: Work with IT leadership and FP&A to update and refine IT spend forecasts throughout the year, maintaining records of contracts and renewals.
- Spend Optimization: Use spend and usage data to identify tools or services that may be redundant, underused, or misaligned with our standards, and raise recommendations for optimization.
- Risk Management: Review new IT spend requests to ensure they fit within budget and flag trade-offs or risks when additional approval is needed.
- End-to-End Procurement: Coordinate procurement activities for IT hardware, software, and services (from request to PO to receipt and invoice) across WEI and Wattpad.
- Fitness-for-Purpose Evaluation: Evaluate requests for new tools and services checking for overlap with existing solutions and alignment with IT standards.
- Needs Assessment & Advisory: Collaborate with requestors to deeply understand their business goals and recommend the most effective solutions, such as leveraging existing enterprise tools or reallocating available licenses.
- Solution Optimization: Provide data-driven insights to help stakeholders select the most sustainable and cost-effective tools, ensuring alignment with global IT standards while avoiding unnecessary duplication.
- Vendor Operations: Collect and compare vendor quotes, support basic negotiations, and maintain an organized overview of key IT vendors and contracts to prevent service interruptions.
- Global Communication: Communicate regularly with vendors and stakeholders in Korea, providing clear updates on purchase status, delivery schedules, and renewal timelines.
- Reporting: Consolidate IT budget, spend, and procurement data into clear spreadsheets or dashboards for reporting to IT and Finance leadership.
- Process Improvement: Help document and improve internal workflows for IT purchasing, approvals, and vendor onboarding, with a focus on repeatability, transparency, and operational efficiency.
- Tool Landscape Management: Maintain a clear view of our existing IT tool and license landscape, and leverage that view to prevent redundant purchases and encourage consolidation.
- Rationalization: Identify patterns in IT spending (such as overlapping tools or underused licenses) and share recommendations to reduce waste, consolidate vendors, or standardize solutions.
- Project Support: Support IT projects by coordinating procurement-related tasks, tracking project-specific spend, and ensuring required tools are delivered on time.
Minimum Qualifications:
- Bilingual Proficiency: Fluency in Korean and English (written and spoken) is REQUIRED. Many key stakeholders, decision-makers, and vendors are based in Korea.
- Experience: 2+ years of experience in budgeting, finance, purchasing, or procurement roles (IT-related experience is an asset).
- Data Savvy: Strong Excel/Google Sheets skills for budgeting, reconciliation, and simple data analysis (pivot tables, lookups, charts, etc.).
- Analytical Communication: Ability to interpret numerical data and turn it into clear, actionable summaries for non-finance stakeholders.
- Stakeholder Management: Strong skills in asking clarifying questions, pushing back and negotiating using data and standards, while maintaining good relationships.
- Commute: Comfortable working in a hybrid environment in the Los Angeles / El Segundo area. Must be able to commute to the current LA office and, after relocation, to the El Segundo office.
- Flexibility: Willingness to occasionally work outside standard LA business hours to coordinate with teams in Toronto and Korea.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with IT procurement (hardware, software, SaaS) or IT asset/license management.
- Familiarity with SaaS licensing models and common IT tools (e.g., Google Workspace, Slack, Okta).
- Experience using ERP or procurement systems (e.g., NetSuite, SAP, Coupa, Jira Service Management).
- Tool Rationalization: Demonstrated experience evaluating and rationalizing tool stacks (e.g., consolidating overlapping tools, sunsetting low-value solutions, or driving standardization).
- Data-Driven Influence: Demonstrated experience reprioritizing or challenging requests using data (e.g., utilization data, overlap with existing tools) while keeping stakeholders aligned.
Why Join Us?
- Global Experience: Gain hands-on experience working in a fast-paced, global entertainment company with operations in Korea, US, and Canada.
- Impact: Play a key role in structuring and optimizing IT spending for a major organization, building processes from the ground up.
- Culture: Be part of a creative, diverse, and collaborative team that is passionate about storytelling and technology.
- Networking: Collaborate with cross-functional teams including Finance, IT Security, and HR across multiple regions.
What Success Looks Like
- Clarity: IT leadership and Finance have a clear, accurate, and timely view of IT spend and commitments across WEI and Wattpad in North America.
- Structure: IT purchasing requests are handled in a structured way, with fewer ad-hoc, redundant, or low-value tool purchases.
- Partnership: Stakeholders understand standards around tools and services and recognize this role as a partner for finding the most appropriate and efficient solutions, not just as an order taker.
- Global Alignment: Vendors and stakeholders in Korea, Los Angeles, and Toronto experience consistent, professional communication and predictable processes.
- Efficiency: Over time, IT spend becomes more efficient through better visibility, fewer duplicate tools, and improved planning.
Salary Range and Description
Top Skills
What We Do
Wattpad. Where Stories Live. Wattpad’s vision is to entertain and connect the world through stories. The global multi-platform entertainment company uses the power of community and technology to enable the creation and distribution of content across a variety of formats. Its flagship app, Wattpad, is home to a community of more than 90 million people who spend over 23 billion minutes a month engaged in original stories. Tap by Wattpad, the company’s second storytelling product, offers short, chat-based stories in over a dozen languages. Wattpad Studios co-produces stories for film, television, digital and print, together with industry partners. Wattpad Brand Partnerships offers a full suite of advertising products to help brands build deep engagement with Gen Z consumers. The company is proudly based in Toronto, Canada.






