Senior Finance Manager, Margin & Unit Costing

About Lumen

Lumen connects the world. We are igniting business growth by connecting people, data and applications – quickly, securely, and effortlessly. Together, we are building a culture and company from the people up – committed to teamwork, trust and transparency. People power progress.

We’re looking for top-tier talent and offer the flexibility you need to thrive and deliver lasting impact. Join us as we digitally connect the world and shape the future.

We’re seeking a Senior Finance Manager who thrives in partnering across organizations and rolling up their sleeves to solve problems. Someone keen on implementing AI to improve manual work streams and rapidly drive key insight identification.

This role supports the financial story from cost quote to long-term performance tracking.

If building great processes and pushing meaningful change energize you, this is your role.

• Drive forward simplification of existing cost models to enable scalable bases for new services and offerings.
• Partner with Pricing teams to improve strategic pricing opportunities through identification of potential excess allocations and opportunities for optimization.
• Partner across organizations and business units to build and develop a seamless solution and review process.
• Develop and enhance costing controls for new model builds and model updates.
• Standardize governance routines for cost model lifecycle management, including maintaining documentation, versioning, and audit-readiness.

• Understand relationship between costs and revenues and how to ensure appropriate alignment between the two.
• Identify key opportunities to minimize costs and maximize margins through effective validation of underlying cost components and their appropriateness.
• Continuously validate cost assumptions and update models as needed.
• Review allocated costs for accuracy and secure stakeholder alignment through quarterly reviews.
• Deepen understanding of balance sheet and implications on future costs.
• Lead strategic planning and forecasting for profitability, ensuring alignment with product life cycle and roadmap, anticipating technology changes and organization shifts.
• Ensure alignment between pricing strategy, cost structures, and margin targets.

• Advance reporting standardization and rationalization across margin and costing functions.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives to simplify and scale margin and costing processes.
• Oversee builds of complex financial models for scenario planning, cost optimization, and variance analysis to proactively identify.
• Create repeatable end-to-end automated solutions that minimize manual intervention and improve data integrity to support all business partners.
• Partner with internal stakeholders to develop key reporting dashboards illustrating up-to-date margin reporting.
• Establish and maintain key KPI metrics around margin and costing accuracy.
• Develop AI agents to minimize and eliminate non-value add processes, streamlining identification of financial insights, enabling rapid detection of anomalies.
• Improve existing data to identify and improve end-to-end processes.
• Identify and mitigate risks related to cost attribution, data integrity, model accuracy, and margin exposure.
• Establish an issue‑escalation framework for cost or margin anomalies to ensure timely resolution.

• Ensure costing models, and automated solutions tie to general ledger actuals during month‑end close and throughout the month.
• Partner with Accounting, SOX teams to validate accruals, deferrals, true‑ups, and ensure compliance with internal controls.
• Maintain audit‑ready documentation and ensure all margin and costing processes meet controllership standards.

• Define and own the multi‑year roadmap for margin governance, costing maturity, automation, and data quality evolution.
• Prioritize initiatives and sequence capability improvements in alignment with product, FP&A, IT/Data, and operational strategies.

• Meet regularly with senior leadership, presenting…