FP&A Associate Manager (UAE National)

Life at Dubai Future Foundation

Dubai Future Foundation (DFF) aims to realize the wise vision of Dubai’s leadership to keep Dubai 10 years ahead, institutionalizing future-oriented thinking and forward-looking methodologies that position Dubai as the leading city of the future.

In collaboration with government entities, global institutions, startups, and innovators, DFF drives collective efforts to imagine, design, and execute the best possible future for humanity.

Under the supervision of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, Chairman of the Executive Council of Dubai, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of DFF, the Foundation oversees a portfolio of initiatives that include the Museum of the Future, Area 2071, Dubai Future Accelerators, Dubai Future Labs, Dubai Future Academy, Dubai Future Forum, Dubai Centre for AI, and the Dubai RDI Program.

Through these platforms, DFF institutionalizes foresight, enables innovation, builds talent, and designs the systems and industries that will keep Dubai 10 years ahead in every dimension of its future.

For more information on the initiatives, projects, and programs of Dubai Future Foundation, please visit the website: www.dubaifuture.ae

Where does this role fit into the bigger picture?

This role is the financial backbone of DFF’s portfolio. The FP&A Associate Manager owns the numbers that underpin how DFF plans, spends, and invests — maintaining the integrity of the foundation’s accounts, building and safeguarding the annual budget, and keeping a forward-looking view of financial performance through rigorous forecasting and analysis. Embedded across both project teams and corporate services, the role turns raw financial data into the insight leadership needs to allocate capital wisely, fund the right initiatives, and ensure every dirham spent advances DFF’s moonshots. It combines the discipline of a finance steward with the curiosity of an analyst — equally comfortable closing the books, challenging a forecast, and pressure-testing the business case behind a major investment

Your Responsibilities

Financial Stewardship & Account Maintenance

• Support the maintenance and integrity of DFF’s accounts, ensuring financial records are accurate, complete, and reconciled.
• Maintain a reliable, up-to-date view of the foundation’s financial position across all entities, initiatives, and cost centres.
• Partner with accounting and corporate services to support month-end and year-end close, reconciliations, and reporting cycles.
• Ensure compliance with internal financial policies, controls, and approval frameworks, flagging gaps or risks proactively.
• Maintain clean, well-structured financial data and a single source of truth that downstream analysis and reporting can rely on.

Budgeting & Annual Planning

• Lead the development of DFF’s annual budget, working with project teams and corporate services to build accurate, bottom-up plans.
• Translate strategic priorities and moonshots into funded, resourced budget lines.
• Run the annual planning cycle end-to-end — templates, timelines, consolidation, review, and sign-off.
• Challenge budget submissions constructively, testing assumptions and ensuring spend is justified and aligned to strategy.
• Establish budget ownership and accountability across departments, with clear baselines against which performance is measured.

Forecasting, Spend Analysis & Performance

• Develop and maintain rolling budget forecasts, updating them as actuals, commitments, and conditions change.
• Track and analyze DFF’s spend across projects and corporate functions — understanding what is being spent, where, why, and against which budget.
• Conduct variance analysis (budget vs. actual vs. forecast), explaining drivers and recommending corrective action.
• Embed within project teams and corporate services to understand spend at source, anticipate overruns, and provide real-time financial guidance.
• Build dashboards and reporting that give leadership a clear, current picture of financial health and burn rate.
• Deliver scenario and sensitivity analysis to support decisions under uncertainty.

Investment Analysis & Capital Allocation

• Lead investment analysis on new initiatives, partnerships, and program expansions — including business-case development, DCF modelling, NPV/IRR, and payback analysis.
• Oversee and provide financial line-of-sight on DFF’s investments and capital-allocation decisions, ensuring capital flows to the highest-impact opportunities.
• Build and maintain robust financial models that quantify the cost, return, and risk of strategic choices.
• Support capital-allocation and prioritization decisions with rigorous, comparable financial analysis across competing initiatives.
• Monitor the financial performance of funded investments against their original business cases, surfacing under-performance early.

Financial Insight & Business Partnering

• Act as a trusted financial partner to project teams, corporate services, and leadership — translating numbers into clear, actionable insight.
• Produce executive-ready financial reports, briefings, and board-level materials.
• Develop and deliver compelling, well-structured presentations that communicate financial performance, insights, and recommendations to leadership and the board with clarity and impact.
• Advise on cost optimization, efficiency, and value-for-money opportunities across the portfolio.
• Strengthen financial literacy and discipline across the organization, helping non-finance teams plan and manage their budgets effectively.
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of FP&A processes, tools, and financial systems

What Dubai Future Foundation offers?

DFF offers a dynamic and mission-driven environment that values collaboration, excellence, and measurable impact. You will work alongside multidisciplinary teams passionate about execution, innovation, and the future of Dubai. Expect diverse challenges, high-level exposure, and the opportunity to contribute directly to shaping Dubai’s readiness for the future.

• Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in Finance, Accounting, Economics, Business Administration, or a related discipline; advanced degree (MBA, MSc Finance) is a plus.
• 3 to 5 years of experience in FP&A, corporate finance, investment analysis, transaction services, audit, or a related field — candidates from diverse backgrounds (corporate, consulting, Big 4, or investment) are welcome.
• Professional finance qualification (CFA, CPA, ACCA, CIMA, or equivalent) is an advantage.

Skills & Competencies

• Strong financial acumen across the full FP&A spectrum: budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis, and spend management.
• Advanced financial modelling skills, including investment analysis, business-case development, DCF, and scenario modelling.
• Solid grounding in accounting principles and the discipline to maintain accurate, well-controlled financial records.
• Analytical rigor — able to turn large, messy financial data into clear, decision-ready insight.