Cloud Cost Analyst

Cloud FinOps Administrator

6-month contract to hire (full-time conversion upon contract end date)

$45-50/hr converting to $100,000-105,000/yr (rate is dependent on experience)

Summary

The overall purpose/primary function of this position is to ensure that the organization’s cloud spending aligns with its business objectives and that cross-functional teams work harmoniously to gain more financial control and predictability, reduce friction, and deliver products faster. This is achieved through financial cost analysis and reporting, developing a key of business-value metrics and KPIs, budgeting, promoting efficiency and optimization, and being an agent of continuous improvement. The function therefore requires a candidate with a strong understanding of financial services in conjunction with wide cloud technology exposure.

Essential Job Responsibilities (% of Time Allocated to Each Responsibility)

Cost accountability and enablement (20%)

• Establish governance and set standards for managing cloud spend
• Build foundation to enable the creation of cost allocation models that align cloud spend with functional ownership across the organization

Measurement and realization (20%)

• Establish metrics and KPIs to measure success of transformation, starting with a set of cost-optimization metrics and eventually shift to unit economics / business value metrics such as cost per transaction or cost per customer serve

Cost optimization (20%)

• Identify key cost-optimization drivers in an iterative and continuous process that provides a consistent methodology to manage cloud consumption in a most cost-effective manner
• Key areas of optimization: Resource optimization, Pricing optimization, Architecture optimization

Planning and forecasting (20%)

• Plan and forecast cloud resources as part of project intake in partnership with engineering teams, to better understand the cost drivers, allocate spend, and benchmark efficiency

Tools and accelerators (20%)

• Deploy cost-management tools to analyze real-time billing and cost data
• Developing a reporting dashboard to manage cloud spend and value tracking
• Implementing automation scripts to set account guardrails and budget alerts

Minimum Requirements and Qualifications

Education and Training

• Degree in relevant field or equivalent work experience
• AWS certifications or GCP/Azure/OCI equivalent very desirable

Knowledge and Skills

• Highly detail-oriented
• A love of data and driving business outcomes with it
• Ability to work as part of a team
• Ability to learn new technologies quickly, and become the subject matter expert
• Strong self-sufficiency, initiative, and work ethic.
• Proven communication and technical writing skills
• Ability to solve complex problems with minimal direction.

Technical Skills

• Experience implementing the FinOps lifecycle – Inform, Optimize, Operate
• Extensive experience with public cloud offerings such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Services, or Oracle Cloud
• Experience with Cloud Management Platforms such as Cloudhealth, Cloudzero or similar
• Experience building BI dashboards (e.g., Quicksight, PowerBI, OAC, etc…)
• Experience authoring SQL
• Conceptually understanding GAAP reporting

Job Experience

• Qualified candidate has with proven experience in project and/or production support roles in an enterprise environment

Bonus Qualifications (Highly Preferred)

• FinOps specific certification and training (e.g., FinOps Foundation Practitioner/Professional)
• Knowledge of service management processes (e.g., ITIL)
• Knowledge working in an Agile environment
• Experience with container technologies
• Experience with managing SaaS platforms