FinOps Manager

The FinOps Manager will drive financial accountability and cost optimization across Sphera’s technology estate, covering Azure, AWS, Heroku, AI usage, and private data centre environments. The role sits at the intersection of Engineering, Product, DevOps, Operations, and Finance, ensuring infrastructure and platform spend is visible, governed, and optimized in line with business value.

This is a hands-on role responsible for operating and refining Sphera’s FinOps strategy, tooling, and governance cadence. The FinOps Manager will help solution families understand their cost drivers, improve usage discipline, optimize reservations and savings plans, and take ownership of actions that reduce waste and improve efficiency across cloud and hybrid environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Operate and continuously improve Sphera’s FinOps strategy, policies, governance forums, and operating model across Azure, AWS, Heroku, AI-related consumption, and private data centre environments.
• Run regular cost governance processes including forecasting, budgeting, optimization tracking, variance analysis, and business reviews in close partnership with Finance.
• Administer and improve FinOps tooling and data quality, including tagging standards, cost allocation, usage transparency, optimization tracking, and governance workflows across solution families.
• Monitor and optimize commercial mechanisms including Azure Reservations, Azure Savings Plans, AWS Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and other commitment-based cost levers.
• Provide visibility, challenge, and practical guidance to solution families so they actively manage infrastructure and AI usage in a cost-effective and accountable manner.
• Design and maintain showback and chargeback models with Finance to support transparent and fair cost allocation across products, functions, and solution families.
• Identify, prioritize, and track optimization opportunities across compute, storage, database, platform services, Heroku usage, AI consumption, and private infrastructure.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, DevOps, and Operations teams to embed cost awareness into architecture, delivery, and operational decision-making.
• Build dashboards, KPIs, and executive reporting covering spend trends, forecast accuracy, commitment coverage, utilization, realized savings, and key consumption patterns.
• Support financial planning processes with robust spend analysis, accrual support, and clear explanations of spend drivers and optimization actions.
• Build FinOps maturity across the organization by establishing repeatable practices, accountability mechanisms, and a strong network of stakeholders across engineering and product teams.

Skills And Experience

• Strong experience in FinOps, cloud cost management, technology financial operations, or a related infrastructure cost governance role.
• Hands-on experience managing spend across Azure and AWS, with familiarity in Heroku and private data centre or hosted infrastructure environments.
• Strong understanding of reservations, savings plans, reserved instances, enterprise agreements, and other cloud commercial optimization levers.
• Experience operating FinOps platforms or cloud cost management tools to support visibility, allocation, optimization, and governance in multi-cloud and hybrid estates.
• Proven ability to run forecasting, budgeting, and cloud cost review processes with Finance and technical stakeholders.
• Experience designing and operating tagging, allocation, showback, and chargeback approaches.
• Strong analytical capability using Excel, SQL, and BI/reporting tools to interpret cost and usage data and turn insight into action.
• Ability to work credibly with Engineering, Product, DevOps, Finance, and senior leaders in a global organization.
• Fluent in English with strong communication and facilitation skills, with the ability to explain technical cost drivers to non-technical stakeholders and challenge teams constructively.

Preferred Experience

• FinOps Certified Practitioner or similar cloud financial management certification.
• Experience in multi-cloud SaaS or product engineering environments.
• Experience managing or governing AI platform or model-related costs.
• Familiarity with data platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks from a cost and consumption perspective.
• Familiarity with CI/CD, cloud-native architectures, and modern DevOps/SRE practices.
• Experience defining FinOps KPIs, governance forums, and accountability models across decentralized engineering organizations.
• Experience using Azure DevOps or Jira to track optimization actions through delivery backlogs.

Success Measures

• Improved visibility and accountability for infrastructure and AI spend across solution families.
• Increased utilization and effectiveness of reservations, savings plans, and other commitment strategies.
• Reduction in avoidable spend and improved tracking of realized optimization benefits.
• Higher quality cost allocation, tagging, and forecasting accuracy.
• Established FinOps governance cadence with clear ownership and action tracking across Engineering, Product, Operations, and Finance.