Austin, Texas, United States, February 2026 — Michael Savelli has started a new position as Chief Financial & Operations Officer at NumFOCUS, where he will provide strategic finance, governance, and operational leadership across a complex nonprofit and open-source ecosystem. In this enterprise-wide mandate, he will lead financial strategy, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and compliance (including GAAP and applicable regulatory requirements), advise the Executive Director and Board on risk and long-term sustainability, and strengthen performance oversight through robust metrics and controls. He will also oversee day-to-day operations across finance, accounting, HR, IT, and administration, optimizing systems, workflows, and cash flow while building high-performing cross-disciplinary teams aligned to organizational strategy.
In a personal note shared alongside the announcement, Michael Savelli expressed appreciation for the mentors and supporters who helped shape this transition, offering “heartfelt thanks” to Rachel Kerestes, Marietta Damond, Brian Lin, and Marci Thomas Sunderland, adding that their “counsel, generosity, and confidence” helped turn an extraordinary opportunity into reality as he begins this next chapter.
Before joining NumFOCUS, Michael Savelli served for about a year as Chief Operating Officer at American Payroll Institute, where he was recruited as a COO/CFO to lead strategy, financial management, and operational execution for a $20M organization with nonprofit and for-profit subsidiaries. In this role, he oversaw Finance, HR, IT, Governance, Legal, and Government Relations, advanced budgeting and modeling to improve results, modernized financial operations through system implementation, and led enterprise response efforts to a major cybersecurity breach, including regulatory coordination and external communications.
Prior to that, he spent around two years at American Psychiatric Association as Chief Operating Officer, and was also appointed Interim CFO with Board approval. He helped steward large-scale nonprofit operations spanning multiple functions, strengthened governance support across key committees, advanced workplace practices and DEI-related initiatives, and delivered measurable operational and financial improvements including revenue outcomes tied to major events and optimized facilities strategy.
Earlier, Michael Savelli built a long tenure of more than a decade at AAAS, where he held multiple executive roles including Chief Operating Officer, Chief Information | Membership Engagement Officer, Chief Technology Officer, and Director – Systems | Programming. Across these leadership assignments, he drove enterprise modernization, strengthened membership engagement and digital strategy, expanded international revenue for a major science communication platform, improved measurement and accountability via data/evaluation capability, and led technology transformation initiatives that improved reliability, scalability, and organizational readiness.
Earlier in his career, he spent about seven years at Intersect Software as Vice President – Products | Engineering, following an initial period as Director – Software Development. He also brings additional early experience across venture-funded startups, including roles noted as Technical Lead (CareerBuilder) and Software Engineer/Architect (Intech, Inc.). Alongside his executive journey, he completed an Executive MBA at George Mason University – Costello College of Business.
About NumFOCUS
NumFOCUS is a 501(c)(3) public charity in the United States with a mission to promote open practices in research, data, and scientific computing by serving as a fiscal sponsor for open-source projects and organizing community-driven educational programs. Its vision centers on enabling an inclusive scientific and research community that leverages actively supported open-source software to make impactful discoveries for a better world.
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