Project Background
You are the program manager embedded in Amazon Marketplace Payments supporting a fast-growing cross-border e-commerce business. The business processes $6B/month in seller payouts and collects buyer funds across 12 currencies. Every morning, Treasury and Finance leadership rely on a daily cash position report to decide whether to sweep funds between accounts, pre-fund payouts, or draw on a credit facility. Today, the report is compiled manually in spreadsheets by two Treasury analysts and is frequently late or inconsistent.
A recent near-miss incident escalated this to exec priority: a delayed and incorrect cash position view caused Treasury to overfund a payout account by $18M for ~6 hours. No customer impact occurred, but the incident triggered an internal audit finding and a mandate to implement stronger controls. The CFO has set a deadline: within 8 weeks, the company must ship an automated, auditable daily cash position report with clear ownership, SLAs, and a rollback plan.
The cross-functional team is small and partially allocated:
- Engineering (6 total): 3 data engineers (50% allocated), 2 backend engineers (25% allocated), 1 SRE (on-call only)
- Finance/Treasury (4 total): Treasury lead + 2 analysts + Finance controller
- Risk/Compliance (2): SOX controls and audit liaison
- Data Platform (shared): owns the enterprise data warehouse and orchestration tooling
The report must cover 30+ bank accounts across 5 banking partners (JPM, Citi, Barclays, DBS, and a local bank aggregator). Data arrives via a mix of bank statement files (MT940/BAI2), partner APIs, and internal ledger events.
Stakeholder Landscape (and Competing Priorities)
- Treasury wants a single “source of truth” by 8:30am ET daily, with the ability to drill into variances and exceptions.
- Finance Controller needs the report to reconcile to the general ledger and support month-end close; they will block launch if definitions are ambiguous.
- Risk/Compliance (SOX) requires evidence of controls: data lineage, access controls, and an audit trail of adjustments.
- Payments Engineering is wary of building “yet another reporting pipeline” and prefers to invest in a longer-term ledger modernization planned for next quarter.
- Data Platform is migrating orchestration from Airflow to a managed scheduler; they will not accept net-new infrastructure that increases operational burden.
You must align these groups on definitions (e.g., “available cash” vs “ledger cash”), delivery scope, and operational ownership.
Constraints
- Timeline: 8 weeks to production launch; CFO review at end of Week 4.
- Cutoff times: Bank files arrive between 6:00–8:00am ET; Treasury needs the report by 8:30am ET.
- Data quality: Some banks deliver late or send corrections; internal ledger events can be delayed up to 30 minutes during peak.
- Compliance: Must meet SOX expectations (change control, access logging, and documented controls).
- No new headcount: You can re-prioritize within existing allocations only.
- Operational reliability: Must not page SRE daily; target a low-noise alerting strategy.
What You Need to Deliver (Candidate Tasks)
- Execution plan: A week-by-week plan to deliver an automated daily cash position report, including milestones, dependencies, and stakeholder checkpoints.
- Definition and scope decisions: Propose the minimum viable report that still satisfies Treasury + Finance + SOX, and explicitly state what you will defer.
- Data and controls approach: How you will ensure reconciliation, auditability, and handling of late/corrected bank data.
- Launch plan: How you will run parallel operations (manual vs automated), define go/no-go criteria, and implement a rollback plan.
- Communication cadence: Who gets what updates (daily/weekly), and how you handle escalations when the report is late or inconsistent.
Complications (Realistic Curveballs)
- Bank partner delay: In Week 3, Barclays announces a format change to their MT940 export that will take 2 weeks to stabilize.
- Competing priority: In Week 5, Payments Engineering gets pulled into a P0 incident reducing their availability by 50% for at least one week.
- Scope pressure: The CFO asks to include a “forecasted end-of-day cash” column based on pending settlements—Treasury says it’s “nice to have,” Finance says it’s risky.
In your answer, walk through how you would compile (and ultimately automate) the daily cash position report for key stakeholders while navigating these constraints, trade-offs, and risks.
