Finance Data & Budget Analyst

Position Title: Finance Data & Budget Analyst
Location: Virginia Beach, VA

Pay Rate: 46$/hr

About The AES Group:
For over 20 years, The AES Group has been a trusted technology staffing and services partner to some of the world's most innovative enterprises. We bring businesses and talent together to deliver impactful cloud, data, AI, and digital solutions that transform organizations and create lasting value. At AES, we believe partnerships are the cornerstone of sustainable growth. By forging strategic alliances with IT staffing firms, MSPs, and government prime contractors, we amplify our reach, deliver greater value to clients, and accelerate innovation. Our success is built on collaboration, trust, and a shared commitment to solving complex workforce challenges together.

Role Summary

The Finance Data & Budget Analyst will support Marine R&E budget management by combining financial analysis, accounting reconciliation, data investigation, and structured problem solving. This individual will work directly with Travis Petry-Johnson, Mindi Tezza's Data Science team, Marine BR, and BR teams across organizations that provide services or R&D support to Marine. The successful candidate will be comfortable taking an unexplained number in a financial report and following the data until the underlying transaction, organizational source, accounting treatment, and root cause are understood.

Primary Responsibilities

• Investigate unexplained R&E costs and budget grief.
• Reconcile affordability, forecasts, actuals, and RBM reporting.
• Trace financial transactions across job numbers, PIDs, cost centers, item/BMS codes, and organizational boundaries.
• Investigate invoices and other expenses that are missing, delayed, incorrectly classified, or insufficiently attributed.
• Partner with BR teams to correct accounting/allocation issues.
• Validate actuals used in the Marine R&E Power BI reporting solution.
• Support mapping/reference datasets necessary to connect transactions to Marine programs.
• Identify recurring data-quality failures and recommend preventative controls.
• Maintain an auditable issue and resolution log.
• Document recurring processes so that successful resolutions do not remain dependent upon tribal knowledge.

Required Qualifications

• Strong finance, accounting, financial-analysis, or finance-data background.
• Demonstrated ability to reconcile large datasets and investigate financial discrepancies.
• Strong Excel/data-analysis capability.
• Ability to work with transaction-level data and understand relationships between financial dimensions.
• Experience performing root-cause analysis rather than simply reporting variances.
• Ability to work across finance, engineering, analytics, and business organizations.
• Strong written documentation and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to translate ambiguous business questions into structured analyses.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Power BI and finance reporting datasets.
• Experience developing data-quality or reconciliation controls.
• Familiarity with R&D budgeting, program/project accounting, cost-center accounting, intercompany charges, or engineering finance.
• Experience with forecasting and forecast-to-actual variance analysis.
• Experience connecting financial transactions to project, program, or job-level master data.
• Familiarity with Caterpillar finance/data environments would be particularly beneficial.
• SQL, Power Query, Python, Alteryx, or comparable data-transformation experience helpful but not mandatory.