Systems Accountant / Financial Business Analyst

• Location: Hybrid -, Chalgrove, Oxford (OX44)
• Salary: £50k+, dependent on experience
• Job Type: Full-Time, Permanent

Role Summary

NewOrbit are hiring a Financial Business Analyst / Systems Accountant to sit alongside our existing Business Analysts and System Architects on FinTech engagements. You will be the person who understands what the client actually does in accounting terms, and who then works with our engineers to turn that into a ledger, a data model, a set of journals – something a system can do, repeatedly and correctly.

Why this role exists

NewOrbit builds bespoke software, and an increasing share of what we build touches regulated financial services: lending, investments, client money, asset administration. Our clients almost always have more domain knowledge than their own systems capture: they know what they do day-to-day, but the rules are scattered across spreadsheets, email chains and heads. Very few of them can tell us how to represent that correctly in a system.

Our Business Analysts and Solution Architects are good: they elicit well and they design well. But they are not, by background, accountants – so when a client says "we capitalise the unpaid interest on arrears at the anniversary unless it's been reclassified" they have to go away and research what that means before they can design for it. That research "tax" is the single biggest constraint on how much FinTech work we can take on.

We have built systems to manage investments, pensions and share plans. As part of those systems, we have built several payroll engines, bank integrations and accounting system engines.

What you'll actually do

You will work in client workshops alongside one of our BAs, asking the sharper questions about what happens in the books. You will challenge the requirements your colleagues have gathered when they don't add up financially, and you will design the finance-shaped parts of our clients' systems – chart of accounts, posting rules, reconciliation logic, reporting structures, asset registers, whatever the engagement needs. You will explain all of this to our engineers, and you will defend your design when they push back.

You will also raise the general finance literacy of the delivery team around you. We are not expecting you to run training courses, but we expect that, a year in, the BAs and SAs you've worked alongside will have absorbed more about accounting than they used to know. The point of hiring you is to increase our company's capability to design and implement systems that handle financial data and processes.

We will also involve you in process design and broader requirements definition work. If this is not something you already do, we will train you on the job.

The person we're looking for

You are a (part-)qualified accountant (ACA / ACCA / CIMA) or an experienced bookkeeper, who has, at some point, left the accounting frontline in favour of systems work. Or you have worked in a technical role in an accounting firm and absorbed knowledge as you went along.

That might mean you moved in-house after practice and became the person who owned the finance system. It might mean you led – or were a significant part of – a migration from one ERP to another and discovered that you enjoyed the design problem more than the month-end close. Either way, by now you think about finance problems in terms of entities, events and flows as naturally as you think about debit and credit.

You are practical. You have reconciled a control account at 9pm and you know what it is to hunt for the missing penny. You treat correctness as a matter of pride rather than something that can be delegated. You can sit in a meeting with a Finance Director and extract what they actually do, not just what they say they do, without either bluffing through the bits you don't know or getting lost in theirs.

We do not require financial-services experience. If you have it, great. If you don't, we are confident that someone with a solid grasp of credit and debit, accruals, asset depreciation and VAT can pick up lending, fund administration or client-money rules in a reasonable time: they are variations on a theme, and we will back you to learn them on the job.

Evidence we would like to see in an interview:

• You can walk us through a real finance-system design you owned or co-owned, and justify the decisions you made.
• You can reason about a finance scenario you have never seen before and produce something sensible, out loud, in front of us.
• You can elicit rules from someone who doesn't fully understand their own process, without glossing over the gaps.

What we're not looking for

You will not enjoy this role if you have only ever worked at firms large enough to have a separate team for every sub-process. You will not enjoy it if finance transformation as a discipline (slide decks, target operating models, advisory frameworks) is how you think. You will not enjoy it if you want to be a CFO in five years; we are not a stepping stone to a finance career. And you will not enjoy it if you don't like writing things down and taking ownership and being accountable for it – our clients will hold us to what you commit to.

We are also not looking for a developer: you don't need to write code. You do need to be able to read a schema, understand an API as a concept, and argue with an engineer about a design on equal terms.

Why NewOrbit?

Being part of NewOrbit is much more than just a salary and holiday allowance (although those are important too!). Your package will include the following benefits, so you can share in our success:

A top benefits package:

• 25 days annual leave + public holidays
• Profit share scheme (discretionary)
• Pension scheme (including salary sacrifice options)
• Private healthcare
• Life assurance
• Cycle to work scheme

A friendly environment full of fellow enthusiasts:

• Meals out
• Activity days & retreat weekends
• Outdoor gym & ping-pong

Work with us to:

• Enjoy what you do: We hire smart people who share our drive and are genuinely proud of our open and sociable team. NewOrbit's diverse range of customers and projects means a lot of variation in your job.
• Grow your career: NewOrbit has a supportive environment which aims to help you achieve your potential. It's not ‘one-size-fits-all’ here, so there are opportunities to shape your role within the company.
• Make an impact: Our driver is to make a positive difference to our clients and the team, so we look for people who own problems and feel personal pride in what they do. We rely on everyone in the team to look outwards and help decide and drive our technical strategy. If you think there's something we can do better, we'll listen.

Application Process

Please send us your CV and any other relevant details you may have to recruitment@neworbit.co.uk.

If your application is shortlisted, this is the process:

1. We will do a short, 10-15 minute phone interview with you to answer any questions you have before you travel to us for a full interview.
2. An in-person interview. We will do several interviews back-to-back in in one visit, to save you travelling multiple times. Expect this to take 2-3 hours in total.
3. We will decide quickly and contact you.

Please note:

• This role is UK based and candidates are required to have the legal right to work in the UK for employment.
• It is preferable if you are able to work in our Chalgrove office (near Oxford) 1-2 days per week.
• You do also need to be able to attend in-person client meetings from time to time.
• A background check (including criminal records check and references) is required for this role.
• NewOrbit are committed to a safe work environment that supports and respects equality, diversity and inclusion within our team.