Chief Financial Officer | Director of Finance

The City of Springfield is seeking an accomplished, forward-thinking financial leader who finds pathways to success to serve as its Chief Financial Officer/Director of Finance.

Springfield is Missouri's third-largest city and sits in the fastest-growing region in the state, making this an exciting time to join the City of Springfield Leadership Team. Under the City Manager's strategic direction, the City is entering an era of modernization, streamlining, and process reengineering focused on greater efficiency and organizational effectiveness. This work is about more than improving individual processes.

It reflects a broader vision for a fiscally sound future - and the strategies, systems, and disciplined choices required to get us there. The next Chief Financial Officer/Director of Finance will have an opportunity to help shape that future. Change agents and culture builders who can pair responsible stewardship with thoughtful transformation will thrive here.

This is an opportunity to do more than manage the finances of a major municipal organization. Springfield is looking for a leader who can help shape the City’s financial future—strengthening long-term sustainability, modernizing financial systems and practices, improving how work gets done, and giving City leaders the information and insight needed to make sound decisions for the community.

The next Chief Financial Officer will inherit the essential responsibility of protecting the City’s financial integrity while also helping lead meaningful organizational change.

If you are a financial leader who values public service, sees opportunities where others see longstanding processes, and can balance innovation with responsible stewardship, we invite you to consider Springfield.

The leader we are seeking is more than a technically accomplished finance professional. We are looking for an executive leader. The successful candidate will bring financial expertise together with curiosity, judgment, courage, humility, and an ability to build trusted relationships.

The successful leader will:

• Create clarity.Translate complicated financial issues into understandable choices. Establish clear priorities, responsibilities, expectations, and measures of success.

• Build trust.Earn credibility through competence, transparency, consistency, ethical conduct, communication, and follow-through.

• Think long term.Look beyond today’s budget and consider the financial consequences of decisions five, ten, and twenty years into the future.

• Challenge constructively.Respect the reasons practices were created while remaining willing to question whether they continue to serve the organization effectively.

• Build partnerships.Position Finance as both a guardian of public resources and a trusted partner that helps departments accomplish their missions responsibly.

• Develop people.Build organizational capacity through clear expectations, coaching, professional development, succession planning, and opportunities for employees to improve their work.

• Deliver results.Move important work from discussion to execution and establish meaningful measures to determine whether improvements are producing the intended results.

Reporting directly to a Deputy City Manager and serving as a member of the City’s executive Leadership Team, the Chief Financial Officer serves as Springfield’s principal financial advisor. The Director provides executive leadership for the City’s financial operations and helps connect resources to priorities, long-term obligations, organizational capacity, and community needs.

Help the City look beyond the annual budget cycle and develop a clearer, integrated understanding of its long-term financial position. The Director will advance multi-year forecasting and scenario planning and help City leadership understand structural pressures, revenue sustainability, reserves, debt capacity, capital requirements, deferred maintenance, lifecycle replacement, technology investments, workforce obligations, and other long-term commitments.

The objective is straightforward: identify tomorrow’s financial challenges early enough to make thoughtful choices today.