Who We Are
Applied Materials is the global leader in materials science and engineering solutions that are at the foundation of virtually every new semiconductor chip and advanced display in the world. The equipment that we create and service is essential to advancing AI and accelerating the commercialization of next-generation semiconductor chips. Join us and push the boundaries of materials science and engineering in a company at the foundation of the electronics industry. The work we do together advances the world’s technology.
What We Offer
Salary:
$216,000.00 - $297,000.00
Location:
Santa Clara,CA
You’ll benefit from a supportive work culture that encourages you to learn, develop, and grow your career as you take on challenges and drive innovative solutions for our customers. We empower our team to push the boundaries of what is possible—while learning every day in a supportive leading global company. Visit our Careers website to learn more.
At Applied Materials, we care about the health and wellbeing of our employees. We’re committed to providing programs and support that encourage personal and professional growth and care for you at work, at home, or wherever you may go. Learn more about our benefits.
Role
Reporting to the Corporate Vice President of Corporate Planning, Finance Transformation, Tax & Treasury, the Head of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) will lead the company’s enterprise-wide financial planning, forecasting, performance management, and decision-support capabilities. This executive will serve as a key finance leader and strategic partner to senior management, helping translate business strategy into financial plans, resource allocation decisions, and measurable operating outcomes.
The Corporate Head of FP&A will lead the development of the company’s long-range financial plans, annual operating plans, quarterly forecasts, and executive performance reporting. This role will oversee corporate-level financial analysis across a complex, global business and drive greater consistency, speed, rigor, and insight across the FP&A organization.
The successful candidate will combine deep financial expertise with strong business acumen, operational discipline, executive presence, and the ability to influence senior leaders across a highly dynamic technology and manufacturing environment.
Key Responsibilities
Enterprise Financial Leadership
- Lead the corporate FP&A function and establish the vision, operating model, talent strategy, and capabilities required to support a global, technology-driven enterprise.
- Serve as a strategic advisor to the CFO, CEO, executive leadership team, and Board on financial performance, planning, business trends, risks, and opportunities.
- Translate corporate strategy into actionable financial plans, performance targets, and resource allocation decisions.
- Drive an integrated planning process that connects strategy, operational plans, investments, headcount, capital deployment, and financial outcomes.
Planning, Forecasting, and Performance Management
- Lead the company’s long-range planning, annual operating plan, quarterly forecast, and monthly performance management processes.
- Develop robust forecasting methodologies that improve visibility into revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, profitability, cash flow, and capital requirements.
- Establish clear financial and operating KPIs, dashboards, and management reporting that enable timely decision-making.
- Lead variance analysis and performance reviews, identifying underlying business drivers and recommending corrective actions when appropriate.
- Ensure planning processes appropriately reflect changing market conditions, customer demand, technology cycles, supply chain dynamics, and other external factors.
- Partner with business and operations leaders on cost structure, productivity, and spend-efficiency programs, and on working capital and cash conversion performance against plan.
Strategic and Business Decision Support
- Provide rigorous financial analysis and decision support for major strategic initiatives, investments, acquisitions, capital allocation decisions, and growth opportunities.
- Partner with business unit leaders to evaluate financial performance, strategic priorities, and investment requirements.
- Develop scenario planning and sensitivity analyses to assess risks and opportunities across multiple business environments.
- Challenge assumptions constructively and provide independent, fact-based perspectives to improve decision quality.
- Support the quarterly earnings cycle in partnership with Investor Relations and Accounting, including guidance development, consensus and street-model reconciliation, and the financial narrative provided to external stakeholders.
Financial Transformation and Process Excellence
- Drive the modernization and continuous improvement of FP&A processes, systems, data, and reporting capabilities.
- Increase automation, standardization, and self-service analytics to improve the speed and quality of financial insights.
- Establish consistent planning methodologies and governance across corporate and business-unit FP&A teams.
- Partner with Finance, IT, Data & Analytics, and other functions to strengthen data integrity, planning tools, and enterprise reporting capabilities.
- Own the FP&A technology roadmap across the enterprise ERP (SAP) and enterprise planning platforms (e.g., Anaplan, OneStream), partnering with IT to ensure planning models, hierarchies, and master data remain aligned to the financial architecture.
- Champion the responsible adoption of AI and machine learning within the finance function — including driver-based and predictive forecasting, anomaly detection, narrative reporting, and analyst productivity — with appropriate governance, data controls, and human review.
- Foster a culture of analytical rigor, accountability, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.
Leadership and Talent Development
- Build, lead, and develop a high-performing global FP&A organization.
- Attract, retain, and develop finance talent with strong analytical, strategic, and business-partnering capabilities.
- Establish clear expectations, performance standards, and career development pathways across the FP&A team.
- Promote collaboration across Corporate Finance, business-unit finance teams, Accounting, Investor Relations, Treasury, Tax, and other key stakeholders.
Skills, Knowledge, Experience & Education
At Applied Materials, Make Possible® is about unlocking new opportunities – with our customers and within our own company.
The ideal candidate will have the following:
- Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, Business, or a related discipline; MBA, CPA, CMA, or other advanced credentials preferred.
- 15+ years of progressive finance experience, including significant leadership responsibility in FP&A, corporate finance, strategic finance, or business finance.
- Demonstrated experience leading enterprise-level planning, forecasting, budgeting, and performance management processes for a large, complex, global organization.
- Experience supporting senior executives and influencing high-level strategic and operational decisions.
- Strong understanding of financial statements, key performance drivers, capital allocation, cash flow, and return-on-investment analysis.
- Proven ability to lead large-scale finance transformation, process improvement, systems implementation, or analytics initiatives.
- Experience in the semiconductor, advanced technology, industrial, manufacturing, or other complex global industries strongly preferred.
- Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to synthesize complex information into clear recommendations for executive audiences.
- Strong leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills, with a demonstrated ability to influence across functions and organizational levels.
- Deep working knowledge of enterprise ERP environments, particularly SAP (ECC and/or S/4HANA), including financial data structures, cost center and profit center hierarchies, and reporting extraction.
- Hands-on experience with enterprise planning and performance management platforms such as Anaplan, OneStream, SAP Analytics Cloud, Oracle EPM, or equivalent, including model design, implementation, and adoption at scale.
- Strong working knowledge of AI applications for enterprise finance functions — including predictive and driver-based forecasting, generative AI for reporting and commentary, and agentic automation of recurring analysis — together with a practical understanding of the data quality, governance, and control requirements these tools demand.
- Proficiency with modern data and visualization tooling (e.g., Power BI, Tableau) and a working understanding of enterprise data warehouse and data governance concepts.
Other Suitability Factors
We are a catalyst to unlock the power of our customers’ ideas and are committed to overcoming challenges that seem insurmountable.
To succeed in this role requires a capacity for complexity and temperament that inc