Workday Finance Lead

Opportunity

This position offers the chance to join a major UK public sector environment as a seasoned Workday Finance Lead, where you will provide technical direction, governance oversight, and specialist knowledge across a large Workday Financial Management landscape.

The role blends deep hands-on finance system expertise with people leadership, partner engagement, and solution assurance. You will help steer the future direction of Workday Financials while contributing to large-scale transformation work and day-to-day service excellence.

Key responsibilities

Leadership and governance

• Serve as the primary subject matter expert for Workday Financials.
• Offer technical guidance across General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Expenses, Fixed Assets, Projects, and Financial Reporting.
• Set and promote strong standards for configuration, solution design, and support practices.
• Assess functional designs and configurations to ensure quality and alignment with requirements.
• Contribute to architecture decisions and help shape the product roadmap.

Delivery and transformation

• Lead the design, configuration, and rollout of Workday Financials capabilities.
• Oversee platform enhancements, release activity, and ongoing improvements.
• Support initiatives that streamline and standardise financial processes.
• Help ensure governance, compliance, and audit obligations are satisfied.

Service management

• Coordinate and prioritise work across support and enhancement demands.
• Track SLA and KPI outcomes and help maintain service performance.
• Act as the senior escalation contact for difficult incidents and issues.
• Contribute to continuous improvement across support operations.

Stakeholder management

• Develop trusted working relationships with senior business stakeholders.
• Run workshops and solution-design working sessions.
• Convert business needs into scalable functional solutions.
• Present recommendations, risks, and trade-offs to leadership.

Team development

• Coach and mentor consultants and analysts.
• Assist with resource planning and workload allocation.
• Encourage knowledge transfer and capability growth within the team.

Required experience and skills

You should bring substantial Workday Financial Management experience, along with a track record of leading Workday finance implementations, optimisation efforts, or support operations. A strong grasp of finance operations and enterprise-level financial processes is essential, as is experience providing technical assurance and governance in ERP or SaaS settings.

The role also calls for confident leadership, coaching and mentoring ability, strong stakeholder management, familiarity with Agile, SAFe, or hybrid delivery approaches, and a solid understanding of ITSM and service management practices.

Preferred experience

Additional exposure to Workday Reporting and Analytics, Workday Integrations, Oracle Fusion Cloud, Oracle E-Business Suite, enterprise transformation programmes, data migration work, Workday certification, or solution architecture would be advantageous.