Senior Director, Accounting & Controlling

About The Role

Camunda is looking for a Senior Director, Accounting & Controlling to lead and evolve our global Accounting function as we scale toward €500M ARR. This is a hands‑on leadership role for someone who combines solid technical accounting depth with a genuine drive to build, automate, and improve; a leader who approaches complexity with an “I can figure this out” and “bias for action” mindset rather than defaulting to caution.

You will be accountable for the full accounting engine: close, reporting, controls, and policy. But equally important is your ability to move at pace, partner credibly with Sales, Rev Ops, and the broader business, and exercise practical judgment that enables growth rather than slowing it down. This is not a role for someone who over‑indexes on risk at the expense of momentum.

A central part of this role is transformation. Camunda has an Enterprise Agentic Automation Team and a genuine appetite to modernize how Finance operates. We’re looking for someone who is energized by that opportunity, who sees AI‑enabled automation not as a buzzword but as a lever they personally want to pull, in partnership with the teams around them.

Camunda operates as a German GmbH consolidating under IFRS, with subsidiaries in the U.S., UK, and Singapore. Our core ERP is Net Suite. This role reports directly to the CFO and is a key member of the Finance leadership team. Team scope (15 FTE):
Accounting Operations, Revenue Accounting, Group Reporting, Tax & Treasury, Global Payroll.

• Own the end-to-end accounting engine, including close, reporting, controls, and policy.
• Ensure accurate, timely IFRS reporting and strong audit outcomes.
• Build a scalable operating model across people, process, systems, and global footprint; own global payroll and treasury operations and controls.

• Serve as the in‑house expert on complex accounting topics: revenue recognition, commissions, equity, payroll, intercompany, FX, treasury, and policy interpretation.
• Partner with Sales and Rev Ops to shape accounting treatment during deal design, commission structuring, pricing decisions, and global entity strategy.
• Translate accounting requirements into workable business solutions that balance growth, margin, and appropriate risk.

• Hire, develop, and retain strong managers and individual contributors across a distributed organization.
• Create clear ownership, accountability, and succession depth across the team.
• Bring empathy and intentionality to how you lead—building a team culture where people grow and do their best work.

• Champion and drive automation across accounting workflows in close partnership with Camunda’s Enterprise Agentic Automation Team.
• Leverage AI‑enabled tools to reduce manual effort, improve insight quality, and scale accounting capacity without scaling headcount proportionally.
• Mature the control environment progressively toward SOX readiness, with an eye toward future capital events.

• Lead auditors, tax advisors, payroll providers, and key external partners.
• Support major milestones including fundraising, M&A, or IPO readiness work streams.

• Meaningful experience leading an Accounting or Controller function in a complex, multi‑entity, distributed environment—ideally at a high‑growth, recurring‑revenue software company of comparable scale and complexity to Camunda.
• Proven ability to lead through others while staying close enough to the work to exercise sound technical judgment.
• A track record of building teams with real depth, not just coverage—people who grow under your leadership.

• Strong technical accounting judgment with heavy experience in revenue transactions, commissions, equity, payroll, and intercompany structures.
• Meaningful exposure to fundraising rounds, M&A activity, and managing through external audits.
• IFRS experience is a plus but not a hard requirement—what matters most is strong accounting fundamentals and the ability to learn quickly.
• Familiarity…