Role OverviewAs the Senior Technical Lead for Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O, you will serve as the in-house platform expert and a critical member of the Enterprise Applications team. This role represents the senior technical voice for F&O at Cortland, with ownership across how the platform is configured, extended, integrated and operated on day-to-day basis, while working closely with the Director of Enterprise Applications and VP on architectural direction. Your deep knowledge and expertise will help shape how F&O participates in Cortland's wider technology landscape and finance processes.
This position is designed for an influential, hands-on technical leader who goes beyond gathering requirements and workshop facilitation-someone who can critically evaluate business needs, challenge assumptions where needed, and translate them into pragmatic, high-quality F&O solutions. You will bring a strong point of view on platform capabilities, best practices, and trade-offs, ensuring decisions are both technically sound and aligned to long-term strategy.
Additionally, you will play a key role in cross-platform collaboration, working closely with the Enterprise Integration & Automation (EIA) team as integrations between F&O and other platforms are designed, executed and delivered. Acting as the F&O subject matter expert, you will help define data flows, integration patterns and solution decisions to ensure they align with the platform architecture and the operating model.
F&O Solution Design & Configuration- Lead the functional design for F&O, recommending how Cortland's finance processes should be configured within the platform, including financial dimensions, chart of accounts, workflows, approval hierarchies, and module-level setup. While a more junior team will carry out much of the routine configuration, you will guide the approach, review their work, and step in hands-on where complexity demands it.
- Ensure that configuration decisions are well-reasoned, properly documented, and maintainable, not just technically correct but right for Cortland's operating model and long-term platform strategy.
- Provide expert input on design questions raised by Product Managers, implementation partners, or finance stakeholders, giving clear, well-grounded recommendations.
- Assess enhancement requests and change proposals against the existing F&O configuration to identify downstream impacts, risks, and the most effective approach to delivery.
- Keep pace with Microsoft's F&O release cycle, understanding what is changing, what new capabilities are becoming available, and how they may be relevant to Cortland.
- Apply judgment on where to extend F&O: in-platform via X++ extensions, externally via Power Platform, Business Events, or Azure Functions, or through Dataverse and integration. Avoid both over-customization in X++ and over-reliance on external orchestration.
Integration Partnership with EIA- Act as the F&O subject matter expert for all integration workstreams; this is one of the most critical aspects of the role.
- Work closely with the Enterprise Integration & Automation team during integration design: providing detailed knowledge of F&O data structures, entities, APIs, and constraints so that integration decisions are grounded in reality.
- Participate in field mapping sessions, review data flow designs, and validate that what is being built will work correctly within F&O's data model and processing logic.
- Flag integration design decisions that could cause problems downstream (whether that is data quality issues, process failures, or configuration conflicts) and help the EIA team navigate them.
- Act as a bridge between how F&O works and how the broader technology ecosystem needs to interact with it, ensuring integrations with Coupa, Adaptive Planning, and other connected systems are designed soundly.
Platform Ownership- Own the ongoing health of the F&O environment (change management, security model, workflow integrity, and configuration coherence), running a structured process for how changes get made, reviewed, and released. On a small team this is a hands-on responsibility.
- Support resolution of complex F&O issues, bringing platform expertise to diagnose root causes and recommend solutions.
- Maintain accurate, up-to-date documentation of the F&O configuration, ensuring the EA team has a reliable record of how the system is set up and why decisions were made.
- Act as the go-to subject matter expert for more junior team members carrying out F&O configuration, reviewing their work, coaching on platform best practices, and stepping in where complex or higher-risk changes require senior judgement. This is not a line management role, but it does require the willingness to guide and upskill others.
Testing & Quality Assurance- Design and execute functional test scenarios for F&O configuration changes and enhancements, ensuring test coverage reflects the complexity of the underlying design.
- Support UAT by helping to validate that test outcomes align with intended configuration behaviour and advising on defect triage where platform knowledge is needed.
- Partner with the EA team's QA function using TestRail to manage test cases and track release quality.
AI & Microsoft Ecosystem- Evaluate Copilot for Finance and embedded D365 AI features for Cortland fit, identifying where they are genuinely useful and where they are not.
- Shape how AI agents (Copilot Studio, custom agents, and emerging patterns) interact with F&O data via Dataverse, custom connectors, and Business Events, bringing a platform-grounded view to what is feasible, safe, and maintainable.
- Contribute to the EA team's AI Tooling Governance function, helping define guardrails for what AI capabilities get access to F&O data and how.
- Stay current on Microsoft's roadmap across F&O, Power Platform, Dataverse, and Fabric, and bring informed perspectives on adoption timing.
Qualifications- Deep, hands-on experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations: you have worked in the system extensively and understand how it behaves, not just what it is supposed to do.
- Strong working knowledge across core F&O finance modules: General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets, Cash & Bank Management, and Financial Reporting.
- Experience contributing to integration design as the F&O subject matter expert, understanding F&O data entities, OData APIs, and how data moves in and out of the platform.
- Strong working knowledge of modern F&O extension patterns: Business Events, Dataverse virtual entities and dual-write, Power Platform integration, and OData APIs, with judgment on when to extend in-platform versus externalize.
- The ability to form and communicate clear, well-reasoned positions on design questions; this role requires opinions, not just options.
- Experience working in a structured delivery environment alongside Product Managers, implementation partners, and technical integration teams.
- Strong attention to detail, particularly around configuration documentation, field mapping, and the downstream consequences of design decisions.
- Able to read X++ and reason about extension patterns (chain-of-command, event handlers, table extensions) well enough to review partner- or developer-delivered code for quality and upgrade safety. You do not need to write X++ daily.
Highly Desirable- Experience with real estate, property management, or multifamily business processes, particularly entity-level accounting, property cost allocation, or lease accounting structures.
- Familiarity with Coupa and how it integrates with an ERP such as F&O, particularly around procurement-to-pay data flows.
- Experience with Adaptive Planning or a similar FP&A tool connected to Dynamics 365.
- Exposure to Microsoft Copilot for Finance and Agentic AI capabilities within the Microsoft ecosystem.
- Experience with Dataverse and Power Platform integration patterns connected to F&O.
- Familiarity with Microsoft Fabric or Synapse Link for Dataverse, particularly for analytics and AI use cases over F&O data.
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance certification (MB-310 or equivalent).
- Familiarity with Agile delivery practices and tools such as Jira.
