Finance Director

EIT Food is Europe’s leading food innovation ecosystem, set up by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). We exist to tackle the biggest challenges facing the food sector, through innovation. Operating across Europe, we bring together companies, universities, research institutions, startups, and citizens to transform how food is produced, distributed and consumed.

We deliver a range of services for our funders, supporting innovation programmes, startups and entrepreneurs, and providing education to support food system transformation.

We are looking for a Finance Director who wants to shape the future of a mission driven organisation and who sees finance not only as stewardship, but as an engine for positive change. This role is both strategic and hands on, guiding the organisation’s financial planning, insight, and operations while supporting teams across EIT Food to make thoughtful, informed, and timely decisions.

You will support our teams to use our funding effectively, support our leaders to deliver within their budgets, and play a central role in developing and winning financially sound commercial opportunities. Importantly, you will lead the evolution of our financial model as EIT Food transitions from grant dependency toward long term financial self sufficiency.

You will report to the CEO and work closely with the COO and wider leadership team, contributing actively to organisational strategy and decision making. You will also lead a dedicated finance team committed to high quality service, learning, and continuous improvement.

What you will lead and enable

As Finance Director, you will shape the strategic financial direction of EIT Food. This includes ensuring that our financial planning and forecasting processes give leaders clarity and confidence to pursue their ambitions. You will help colleagues across the organisation understand how their activities translate into financial outcomes and guide them in aligning delivery with funding, resources, and impact.

Your leadership across FP&A and our core finance processes is at the heat of your role. Data, systems, and processes will fall within your remit, and you will steward the development of our financial systems and reporting tools so that information is reliable, accessible, and insightful. You will help streamline how we budget, track, and report, and you will guide the organisation toward better integration of systems that support financial decision making.

Good governance will be central to your role. This includes maintaining strong internal controls, ensuring compliance with relevant regulations, including the provisions of our grant funders for cost reporting and accurate financial data. You will support the organisation to manage financial risks, and you lead our annual accounting processes as we work across multiple countries and entities. You will also strengthen how we manage cash, liquidity, and long term sustainability planning.

Note, we are a group of companies across 5 locations (Belgium, Poland, Germany, Spain and the UK), so your remit includes group accounting, audit and control.

You will play an important role in enabling revenue generation. This means supporting colleagues in designing clear value propositions, developing financially sustainable services, structuring competitive and responsible pricing, and building business cases that reflect real cost, opportunity, and risk. Rather than acting as a gatekeeper, you will be a partner, empowering teams to make good commercial choices.

In our grant and donor funded work, you will help maintain excellence in planning, reporting, and financial stewardship across the full project lifecycle, working in close partnership with our Operations team. You will ensure that we meet our obligations to our funders (currently our main funder is the EIT, under Horizon Europe), and that the organisations who receive funding through us have the clarity and guidance they need to deliver effectively and manage risk.

Finally, you will nurture a culture of partnership, curiosity, clarity, and service within the finance team. You will help your colleagues grow in their roles…