Cisco—Finance Analyst-Techno-Functional Financial Analyst – Finance, AI & Advanced Analytics - 6+yrs exp

Job description

Description: Meet the Team Join a forward-looking Finance organization that combines financial analysis, business intelligence, automation, and emerging AI technologies to solve real business problems. The team partners closely with Finance, business stakeholders, Data Science, Engineering, Information Security, and Governance teams to develop secure, scalable, and practical analytical solutions. Your Impact As a Techno-Functional Financial Analyst, you will combine strong Finance and FP&A expertise with hands-on capabilities in Power BI, SQL, Python, Machine Learning, Generative AI, and Agentic AI. You will translate complex finance requirements into dashboards, predictive models, AI-powered applications, and automated workflows that improve reporting, forecasting, productivity, controls, and decision-making. This role requires practical experience in implementing AI/ML solutions for real business use—not just training, coursework, or proof-of-concept exercises. You Will Finance, Reporting & Business Analytics - Prepare and deliver periodic financial and management reporting covering bookings, revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, forecasts, and other key business metrics. - Partner with Finance Controllers, business leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders to understand requirements and provide accurate, timely, and actionable financial insights. - Perform variance analysis across actuals, forecast, budget, prior quarter, and prior year to identify drivers, trends, risks, and opportunities. - Support monthly and quarterly close activities through data validation, reconciliations, P&L reviews, and investigation of reporting discrepancies. - Develop and maintain interactive dashboards and executive reports using Power BI, Excel, and other BI tools. - Extract, integrate, and analyze large datasets using SQL, Python, Excel Power Query, and appropriate data-processing technologies. - Build forecasting, trend-analysis, and scenario-planning models to support management decisions. - Translate functional requirements into reporting solutions, calculation logic, data models, dashboards, and analytical products. - Perform data-quality checks and partner with Finance, Data Engineering, and Technology teams to resolve data and reporting issues. - Automate recurring reports, reconciliations, and manual finance activities using Excel, VBA, Power Query, Python, Power BI, or workflow-automation technologies. - Prepare executive summaries and presentations that clearly communicate business performance, financial risks, opportunities, and recommended actions. - Document data sources, business rules, calculations, reporting methodologies, procedures, and key controls. - Support user-acceptance testing, regression testing, implementation, and adoption of new finance systems, dashboards, and analytical solutions. - Identify opportunities to simplify, standardize, and improve finance reporting and planning processes. Generative AI, Machine Learning & Agentic AI - Identify finance use cases where Generative AI, Machine Learning, and Agentic AI can improve forecasting, reporting, productivity, controls, and decision-making. - Design, build, test, and implement AI/ML solutions for real finance and business requirements. - Develop predictive models for forecasting, classification, anomaly detection, risk identification, and other financial applications. - Perform data preparation, feature engineering, model selection, training, validation, and performance evaluation using appropriate ML techniques. - Apply techniques such as regression, time-series forecasting, decision trees, Random Forest, XGBoost, or equivalent methods based on the business problem. - Build Generative AI applications using Large Language Models (LLMs) for financial commentary, document analysis, summarization, question answering, and insight generation. - Develop Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions using approved internal documents or structured data to produce grounded and traceable responses. - Design Agentic AI workflows that retrieve data, perform analysis, apply business rules, and generate controlled outputs with human oversight. - Integrate AI solutions with approved data sources, APIs, databases, dashboards, and workflow tools while following organizational security requirements. - Apply prompt engineering, structured outputs, and contextual grounding to improve the accuracy and consistency of LLM-generated results. - Implement AI guardrails covering data privacy, confidential information, prompt injection, hallucination, toxicity, and unsafe output. - Establish human-in-the-loop review and approval controls for finance-related AI recommendations and outputs. - Evaluate AI solutions using appropriate measures such as groundedness, faithfulness, relevance, accuracy, latency, and cost. - Monitor implemented models for performance degradation, data drift, unexpected outputs, and changing business conditions. - Explain model results and key drivers using interpretable techniques such as feature importance or SHAP, where appropriate. - Maintain documentation covering model assumptions, training data, validation results, limitations, controls, and implementation decisions. - Develop reusable and maintainable Python code using appropriate software-development and version-control practices. - Use GitHub for source-code management, version control, documentation, issue tracking, and collaboration. - Use GitHub Copilot for code development, debugging, test-case generation, refactoring, and documentation, while independently validating generated code. - Partner with Finance, Data Science, Engineering, Information Security, and Governance teams to move suitable solutions from prototype to controlled business use. AI/ML Implementation Experience Candidates should be able to demonstrate one or more completed implementations, such as financial forecasting or predictive analytics, revenue/bookings/margin/pipeline/cash-flow prediction, financial anomaly detection, automated financial commentary, a finance knowledge assistant using RAG, document extraction or summarization, an AI agent that retrieves data and performs analysis, risk-scoring/classification models, or LLM-based workflows integrated with a database, API, or business application. Candidates should be able to clearly explain the business problem, their individual contribution, data preparation and modeling approach, technology and architecture used, model selection and evaluation, security and governance controls, measurable business impact, and how the solution was deployed, monitored, and maintained. Who You’ll Work With You will collaborate closely with Finance Controllers, business leaders, Finance teams, Data Science, Data Engineering, Engineering, Information Security, Governance, and Technology teams to translate finance requirements into scalable analytical and AI solutions. Who You Are You are a techno-functional Finance professional who can connect finance requirements with technology solutions. You combine strong financial and commercial understanding with analytical thinking, structured problem-solving, curiosity about emerging technologies, and a strong ownership mindset. You are comfortable explaining technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, working across functions, and taking solutions from requirements through implementation and adoption. You also demonstrate sound judgment around financial-data confidentiality and the responsible use of AI. Minimum Qualifications - Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Business, Economics, Data Science, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline. - Relevant professional experience in financial analysis, reporting, business intelligence, or finance transformation. - Strong practical experience with Power BI, SQL, and Excel. - Hands-on experience implementing Generative AI, Machine Learning, or Agentic AI solutions. - Strong financial analysis, management reporting, and business-partnering experience. - Advanced experience with Power BI, SQL, and Excel. - Proficiency in Python for data analysis, Machine Learning, and AI solution development. - Experience building AI agents, agentic workflows, or LLM-powered business applications. - Experience using GitHub and GitHub Copilot for application or solution development. - Demonstrated ability to translate finance requirements into dashboards, predictive models, AI applications, and automated workflows. - Evidence of at least one AI/ML solution implemented or deployed for actual business use. Technical Skills Essential: Power BI including data modeling and DAX; SQL; advanced Excel and Power Query; Python; Pandas and NumPy; scikit-learn, XGBoost, or equivalent ML frameworks; Generative AI and LLM fundamentals; prompt engineering; structured LLM outputs; Agentic AI concepts and workflow orchestration; Git, GitHub, and GitHub Copilot; data visualization and executive-level financial storytelling. Desirable: LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or comparable AI frameworks; RAG and vector databases; Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, or equivalent cloud AI platforms; n8n, Langflow, Power Automate, or comparable workflow tools; REST APIs and JSON; model deployment, monitoring, testing, and MLOps; responsible AI, privacy, access controls, and enterprise AI governance; enterprise Finance systems and data platforms. Preferred Qualifications - Finance qualification or MBA in Finance. - Relevant certifications in Power BI, Data Science, Machine Learning, Generative AI, or cloud AI platforms. - Experience applying AI/ML to finance use cases such as forecasting, anomaly detection, financial commentary, reporting automation, or decision support. - Experience working in enterprise environments with strong data-security and governance requirements. Why Cisco? At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint. Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. We are Cisco, and our power starts with you. Disclaimer To ensure that we hire the best talent in the right way, we follow a strict hiring process and recently, Cisco has been made aware of fraudulent recruiters claiming to be from the company. Please be advised that any communication from Cisco about careers will: - be in direct response to an application you have submitted through the company career site - begin with screening or an interview - originate from a Cisco email address, and - be conducted across email, phone, or WebEx Cisco will never make a job offer without conducting an interview process or ask you for money in any way. If you have been requested to apply for a role or have received an offer from a site other than https://careers.cisco.com or cisco.wd5.myworkday.com, do not provide any personal identifying information, including your Aadhaar or other personal identifying number, birth certificate, banking information, driver's license, or passport. If you are the target of a recruiting scam, consider filing a report with your local law enforcement authorities. Cisco bears no responsibility, and cannot be held liable, for any claims, damages, expenses, or other inconvenience resulting from or in any way connected to recruiting scams. Skills: power bi, sql, python, excel, machine learning, generative ai, data analysis, power query, pandas, numpy, scikit-learn, xgboost, large language models, prompt engineering, agentic ai, git, github, data modelling, dashboard development, vba, retrieval-augmented generation, workflow automation, data visualization, executive reporting, variance analysis, forecasting, business intelligence, stakeholder management, collaboration, problem solving