Our people
Oct 9, 2025
Tapping into data to drive strategy: meet Wolt Finance & Strategy Manager Vlad
In fast-growing, dynamic companies like Wolt, the path to success can come in many different ways. This reality comes across loud and clear in a discussion with our Finance & Strategy Manager Vladislav Kudriavtsev when we chatted about his time at Wolt so far.
Note the “Finance & Strategy” title, which clearly tells you that this isn’t just some routine number-crunching and reporting exercise. At Wolt, our finance team works with data from 30+ countries, turning insights into best practices that not only fuel growth but also help shape the company’s overall strategy.
Our Finance & Strategy team is hiring, so let’s hear about the team and what it’s like to work at Wolt from Vlad, who somehow a few months into his Wolt career also found the time to (checks notes) … project manage the launch of an app?! Yes, you read that right. Read on to find out more!
Hello 👋 Please tell us a little about yourself!
“My name is Vlad. I’m originally from a small town around 400 km north of Moscow. In terms of professional experience, before Wolt I spent a couple of years with one of the Big 4 accounting companies, KPMG, before moving to Canada where I was in a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) role at a small gaming company called Kabam. I then moved on to a larger company, Electronic Arts, which was quite a change in scenery. I went from a company that had around 400 employees to one that had around 10,000!
The EA culture and team were great, and I enjoyed my time there, but eventually I wanted to move onto a new challenge where I could build new processes from scratch and have a large impact. I relocated to Helsinki and wanted to see what the local market looked like. Through my research, I was able to find something really interesting at Wolt. I decided to apply and ended up starting at Wolt last June.”
I understand that your hiring story is a little … unorthodox?
“Actually, it’s a very interesting and funny story – I applied for one position at Wolt, but it wasn’t the one that I landed! I initially applied for a Finance Merchant role but just before the interview started I was browsing through Wolt’s careers site and stumbled on another interesting role called Finance & Strategy Manager. What really caught my eye was how the job was described and what the responsibilities were. It was put in a very sophisticated way, balancing finance and strategy in a way that I hadn’t seen before. It told me that you can have an impact on strategy, and therefore also a big impact on the business.
It was the strategic impact of the role that caught my attention. So when I joined the interview, I thought maybe I need to talk about this job, actually, and not the one that I applied for! When we chatted with the recruiter, I asked if they could connect me with the hiring manager of this new role instead, and I entered that role’s interview process. The whole process was very interesting and in the end it was a match!”
Whoa - that’s an interesting turn of events!
“Yes! And in my opinion, the way the hiring process was handled is representative of the culture at Wolt. What I’ve found is that the company has very talented people focused on creating opportunities right from the get-go. Our Talent Acquisition team is focused on getting the best people to join us, so if they see the chance to create a positive outcome or opportunity, they go full-out towards it.
I was surprised and pleased how very direct and right to the point our conversations were. It was handled very efficiently. That’s very Wolt too, we’re all about getting things done here!”
Tell us more about the Finance & Strategy team at Wolt
“On one level the Finance and Strategy team at Wolt operates in the same areas and with the same responsibilities as you find with traditional FP&A teams. The scope of my job covers all 30+ countries where Wolt operates. My focus area is our General & Administrative and central functions - they’re essentially our roles beyond the operations organization, ranging from legal to marketing to people organizations and more. Currently it’s around 5,000 people across all Wolt locations and functions.
Our team carries the name Finance and Strategy for a reason. We don’t just look at numbers to track progress against company-wide goals - we also play a key role in shaping the direction of the business. A big part of the work involves advising the leadership team on the financial implications of different paths forward, while also contributing to the strategy itself. For me, that combination makes the role especially meaningful: it creates room for finance partners and team members to influence decisions at the highest level by bringing data-driven insights into strategic discussions.”
Can you give any examples of how this strategic work with the senior leadership team might look like?
“To give you an example, one of my recent tasks has been working closely with our senior leadership team on helping to shape practices for our global hiring. This has involved working on questions like: How do we cascade down top-level guidance on our hiring-related budgeting processes? How should we communicate new processes to ensure our teams can adopt them smoothly? And how to connect the dots and make sure that nothing will “break” operationally when we make changes into our hiring-related finance processes?
The core of the job is still the traditional FP&A – you need to analyze and plan the numbers, help teams meet their forecasts, and so forth – but the strategy is an additional opportunity to show how you can transform insights to influence and support the executive team. It’s about connecting the strategy with operational elements outside of the direct finance numbers.”
What does this look like on a day-to-day basis?
“The day-to-day tasks will depend on where we are in our timelines. It’s a combination of projects and FP&A activities. So, for the operational part my role as finance manager is to be responsible for worldwide headcount planning and forecasting. Day-to-day activities will be things like forecasting the headcount payroll and all costs related to the headcount like travel, entertainment and other elements.
It's about maintaining the numbers, making sure that you're on top of them and prepared to run the forecast and updates in the payroll sphere, and communicating the insights to the relevant stakeholders. For the strategy part, there can be various projects and it’s all about collaborating closely with our leadership team to build scalable, future-proof solutions that support our growth in the right way.
At Wolt, we’re encouraged to use AI to scale the way in which we work. In my role, I use AI to help me shape effective communications. For instance, if we think about communicating insights to the C-suite, they don't need a huge amount of context, but are more about what actions to take from the insights that you're providing. I use AI to get an assessment of my thoughts, to make sure that I'm not losing any critical points of my message.
I use AI to sharpen my messages and communications. For instance, as I'm running the headcount planning Wolt-wide, throughout our cycles I communicate to all the functional leaders and their reports, which is about 120 people. My communications need to be applicable to this very diverse audience so the process runs smoothly for all of them. So I use AI to polish and tailor my messaging to the various stakeholder groups”
Are there any cool projects you’ve been able to work on?
“You bet! An amazing experience for me, both professionally and personally, was the launching of an internally built headcount app. Around three months after I joined, the VP of Tech and Insights in the People Team designated me to support the building and launching of this app.
I jumped into this project to co-lead the development of the app to get to the minimum viable product launched. It’s essentially a single platform for headcount requests, approvals, and backfill management globally at Wolt. The cool thing is, it was built in-house from scratch. For me as a finance person, the whole experience of helping to build a product was just amazing. I think coming from finance and knowing how details matter helped me to launch this product in a more successful way because we were able to identify the details that mattered for different teams.
I went outside of my comfort zone and took ownership of a solution that is now being used company-wide. It was fantastic!”
A finance person launching an app?! How does that even happen?
“It’s about the culture here. Wolt is a high-growth environment that enables innovation and free thinking. I don’t think this case would be possible in other large companies.
Wolt is at the sweet spot of having the scale-up mindset and agility to move fast, while being backed by the resources of a larger organization. This positioning is unique, because you still get incentivized to go off the beaten path and seek innovation.”
It's good that you mentioned the culture. Tell us more.
“Here you have total trust to be the full owner of your area, to fully execute projects and tasks, and have the freedom to decide the best way to do it. You don't need to wait for anyone to tell you what to do. If you own it, it's your responsibility to be proactive and do the things that will be beneficial for all stakeholders.
You’re often encouraged to move beyond your comfort zone here, with plenty of opportunities to grow and challenge yourself – and that makes a real difference in your career progression. What I’ve felt, experienced and learned at Wolt in one year feels like it would have taken five years anywhere else.”
Wolt is hiring for Finance & Strategy. Who should apply?
“A strong foundation in FP&A is important because Wolt operates a three-sided platform serving merchants, courier partners, and customers. Being involved in financial planning means you’re swimming between these three pillars, which is really complicated modelling versus a more straightforward industry serving one big pool of customers, for instance. You need multidimensional thinking, and that definitely keeps things interesting!
Your scope of work is highly aligned to the exact role and scope you have. If you’re the finance partner for marketing, you’ll get to deep-dive and learn a lot about the domain. Due to the strategic nature of our work, you’ll work on projects ranging from the technical side, like maintaining and launching new systems, up to communications on how to tackle major shifts in strategy.
We look for people who are motivated to drill down to the details and own the task you’re assigned. You need an ownership mentality — you fully own your area end-to-end and find the ways to achieve the task, and, if needed, how to upgrade your skills to do that. In terms of softer skills, you need proactive and clear communications given the fast-moving environment.
Wolt is a very, very high-growth environment, and there are lots of priorities that are changing almost every week, or every month. It’s an exciting time to join our team!”
