Roles & Responsibilities
Financial Strategy, Sustainability, and Blended Finance
- Lead the development of Splash’s long-term financial strategy in alignment with organizational growth, government partnership, and impact goals.
- Help Splash build a more sophisticated capital strategy that distinguishes between philanthropic funding, catalytic capital, government co-financing, donor-funded infrastructure, technical assistance, and long-term public ownership.
- Partner with the CEO, Development team, and program leadership to assess how different funding sources can support different needs across the organization.
- Support financial modeling for government co-financing, donor match requirements, phased implementation, working capital needs, and long-term sustainability.
- Advise the CEO and Board on tradeoffs related to scale, risk, unrestricted reserves, cost recovery, donor restrictions, and country-level financial exposure.
- Lead scenario planning and financial modeling for multi-year growth, including delayed disbursements, foreign exchange exposure, government payment timing, implementation shifts, and funding gaps.
- Build financial models that incorporate inflation, foreign exchange exposure, country-specific cost assumptions, and implementation timing so multi-year budgets are realistic and decision-useful.
Global Financial Management & Reporting
- Oversee global budgeting, forecasting, cash flow management, and financial reporting across Splash’s US and international operations.
- Ensure timely, accurate, and decision-useful reporting for the CEO, management team, Board, Finance Committee, donors, and country teams.
- Strengthen financial dashboards and analysis so country, regional, and global teams can track burn rates against activities, deliverables, restricted donor budgets, and implementation progress in real time or near-real time.
- Manage organizational cash flow, reserves, restricted and unrestricted funding, and liquidity planning.
- Partner with program and Development teams to ensure budgets, forecasts, and donor reports accurately reflect implementation realities.
- Support budget modeling for new opportunities, including overall project budgets, donor-specific restricted budgets, match or co-financing assumptions, cost recovery, and implementation timelines.
- Ensure grant budgets, cost recovery, indirect cost allocation, and donor reporting are disciplined, transparent, and aligned with Splash’s operating model.
Government Co-Financing and Public Finance
- Support the design and financial oversight of government co-financing arrangements, including contribution models, annual workplans, budget alignment, and fund-flow options.
- Help assess the financial implications of government-funded implementation, direct government procurement, contractor payments, cost-share commitments, and delayed public disbursements.
- Partner with country teams to ensure government co-financing commitments are financially realistic, well documented, appropriately accounted for, and monitored.
- Support financial analysis related to public-sector ownership, operations and maintenance, and the long-term transition of responsibility to government systems.
- Bring practical understanding of the risks and realities of operating in low-income settings, including public finance cycles, procurement constraints, documentation gaps, currency exposure, and varying local accounting capacity.
International Compliance, VAT, Tax, and Risk
- Ensure compliance with US nonprofit requirements, donor regulations, accounting and audit standards, and relevant international financial regulations.
- Oversee financial operations across multiple countries and entities, including registration, statutory compliance, local audit requirements, payroll, tax, banking, and accounting practices.
- Manage VAT, withholding tax, recoverability, exemptions, and other country-level tax issues that affect donor budgets, infrastructure delivery, and local contracting.
- Lead the annual audit process and manage relationships with external auditors, tax advisors, legal advisors, and other technical consultants.
- Maintain strong risk management practices across global financial operations, including internal controls, segregation of duties, fraud prevention, procurement controls, and documentation standards.
Systems, Controls, and Operational Discipline
- Build and maintain strong financial systems, policies, processes, and internal controls that support a growing global organization.
- Strengthen financial technology, reporting tools, data integrity, and cross-country accounting processes.
- Build and enforce the accounting and reporting architecture needed to track restricted funds by donor, project, activity, deliverable, country, budget line, and spending status.
- Strengthen budgeting, forecasting, financial controls, cost documentation, and approval processes so they are clear, efficient, and scalable.
- Ensure finance processes support procurement, contracting, and implementation without making finance a bottleneck.
- Drive a culture of financial accountability, transparency, and timely decision-making.
Team Leadership and Cross-Functional Partnership
- Lead, mentor, and strengthen Splash’s global finance team.
- Build financial capacity across country teams and non-finance leaders so budget ownership is distributed and disciplined.
- Partner closely with Program, Development, Operations, and country leadership to align financial resources with program delivery and organizational priorities.
- Translate complex financial issues into clear, practical guidance for colleagues who are not finance specialists.
- Serve as a trusted partner to the CEO, Treasurer, Finance Committee, and Board.
Qualifications
- Minimum of 15 years of progressively senior financial leadership experience.
- Significant experience in global financial management, preferably in an international nonprofit, NGO, foundation-funded organization, development finance institution, or mission-driven organization operating across multiple countries.
- Experience with international accounting standards and practices, including IFRS and/or IPSAS where relevant, donor compliance, grants management, restricted funding, audits, internal controls, and multi-entity financial operations.
- Demonstrated ability to lead financial strategy in complex operating environments.
- Experience with low-income or lower-middle-income country contexts strongly preferred.
- Practical understanding of VAT, tax, multi-currency exposure, statutory compliance, procurement, and financial risk in international settings.
- Experience supporting government co-financing, public-sector partnerships, infrastructure financing, development finance, or blended finance strongly preferred.
- Strong financial modeling, scenario planning, forecasting, and analytical skills.
- Demonstrated experience building multi-year, multi-country budgets, donor-specific restricted budgets, and burn-rate analysis.
- Experience working with Boards, Finance Committees, Treasurers, CEOs, and senior leadership teams.
- Master’s degree in finance, accounting, business, public administration, or related field preferred. CPA, MBA, or equivalent experience strongly valued.
- Advanced proficiency with Excel and financial reporting systems. Experience with financial dashboards, accounting platforms, grant management tools, and reporting analytics is an asset.
The Ideal Candidate
- The ideal candidate is both technically strong and strategically curious. They can manage audits, budgets, compliance, and controls, but they are also energized by the larger question: what financial architecture will allow Splash’s model to scale, transition, and endure?
They will bring:
- Strong judgment in complex, ambiguous, multi-country environments.
- A practical understanding of how money actually moves across donors, governments, contractors, country teams, and local partners.
- Comfort working across philanthropy, government co-financing, restricted grants, catalytic capital, and other forms of mission-aligned finance.
- The instincts of an operator, builder, and strategist, with the ability to create standards, systems, and financial tools that are useful across teams.
- Ability to identify financial risks early and communicate them clearly without slowing the organization unnecessarily.
- A systems mindset, with the ability to build processes that are disciplined, useful, and agile.
- Strong partnership orientation with program, Development, operations, and country leaders.
- High standards for transparency, accountability, and follow-through.
- Excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills.
- Ability to operate across time zones and cultures with humility, clarity, and respect.
- Commitment to Splash’s values: People, Quality, Honesty, Joy, and Mistakes.
Compensation & Benefits
- The compensation for this role is $170,000 - $200,000, in line with experience. At Splash, we prioritize our mission by offering benefits to support our employees and their families.
- Splash operates across time zones with flexible work schedules. Team members can set standard hours within their time zone but should be available for occasional off-hours work. This is balanced by a self-managed schedule allowing personal time.
- Benefits include 18 days of paid time off, increasing by 2 days each year up to 28 days, 11 paid holidays, and Wellness Fridays reduced hours on Fridays. Additionally, we offer two weeks of paid time off mid-year during July 4th week and the last week of the year.
- Medical, dental, vision insurance, and a 401K plan with a 3% match.
