Cloud FinOps Engineer

Company: Nationwide Building Society Published: 9th April 2023 Closing Date: 30th April 2023

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As a FinOps Engineer you will by a key part of our FinOps capability within the Cloud Engineering team and be an advocate for driving the maximum value from our cloud usage. You will use your expertise of Cloud and FinOps to help empower engineering teams to manage and optimise their cloud cost footprint and embrace a “cost as a metric” mindset across our multi-cloud environment.

This role will involve interacting with a wide range of engineering teams to drive technical discussions and influence cost optimal, value-based outcomes. You will also have the opportunity to get hands on to deliver automated solutions to optimise our cloud optimisation efforts.

Alongside the technical aspects of the role, you will regularly interact with Finance and Procurement teams more regularly than you might in a typical engineering role as we operate and refine our allocation, chargeback and rate optimisation strategies.

We have a huge amount of data at our disposal, making that data available to the right people, at the right time, in the right format is a key capability, so if you love getting stuck into detailed data analysis and finding innovative ways to use data to drive decision making, you’ll feel right at home.

What you’ll be doing

You’ll work in our FinOps function that is responsible for ensuring our public cloud costs are controlled, optimal and sustainable.

This will involve partnering with platform & application engineering teams and their stakeholders to help spread understanding and awareness of cloud cost drivers, trends and optimisation opportunities while working to ensure cost efficiency is built into product roadmaps and ways of working.

You’ll use your broad knowledge of AWS and Azure to analyse and contextualise large volumes of cloud billing and usage data, digesting it into actionable insight, using data to tell a story and build out ‘mini business cases’ to get optimisation work appropriately prioritised against competing demands.

You will also play a key role in running our operational processes including anomaly detection, chargeback, budget monitoring, forecasting, MI creation and Savings Plan \ Reserved Instance planning; while proactively seeking innovative opportunities to improve process and drive efficiency, automation, and cost reduction across all cloud usage.

Education and knowledge sharing is also an important part of the role, using your expertise to help empower teams to make smart data-driven decisions about their cloud usage. This includes educating a varied audience in all things cloud from how to get the best out of our cloud cost tooling, performing optimisation reviews, sharing best practises and success stories, and being an advocate for maximising the value our members get from our investment in cloud.

About you

We are looking for someone with a keen interest in all things public cloud and FinOps, with experience covering most of the below:

• Strong experience of public cloud billing mechanisms and analysis of large, detailed billing data sets
• Understanding of cloud cost management and optimisation techniques available in public cloud environments covering both usage and rate optimisation
• Good knowledge of FinOps principles, domains and capabilities
• Understanding of the AWS \ Azure Well-Architected pillars and the services that underpin common architectural patterns
• Hands on experience with some of the following cloud cost tooling – AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, Cloudability, Cloud Health, Cloud Custodian
• An interest in getting deeply involved in all things related to cloud consumption billing and forecasting
• Comfortable producing and presenting high quality, insightful data to a wide range of stakeholders
• An eye for detail – understands the importance of data accuracy to build trust in data
• Automation and scripting with Python, shell, PowerShell or similar
• Exposure to version control using Git and infrastructure as code with Terraform or similar tooling
• Ability to build rapport, credibility and inspire trust at all levels of the organisation
• Growth mindset – always looking to learn and grow your knowledge and apply it to mature our FinOps capabilities

It would be a bonus if you also had any of these:

• AWS, Azure or FinOps certifications
• Understanding of financial systems and accounting processes
• Experience planning, managing and purchasing Reserved Instances & Savings Plans
• Experience using T-SQL, Athena, Power BI to analyse data
• Experience with data extract, transformation and load (ETL\ELT) techniques and tooling
• Experience with CI\CD tooling such as BuildKite, Azure DevOps, Harness

We’re also interested in who you are as a person. Why? Because our membership is made up of so many different kinds of people, so we want our employees to be just as diverse. We’d love to hear about:

• Your values, and what makes you who you are
• How you’d make a difference to our members in this role

We know applying for jobs can sometimes feel like you’re sending an application into a black hole. We review each application individually. So, it’s a good idea to call out your most relevant experience on your application to give yourself the best chance.

The extras you’ll get

There are all sorts of employee benefits available at Nationwide, including:

• A personal pension – if you put in 7% of your salary, we’ll top up by a further 16%
• Up to 2 days of paid volunteering a year
• Life assurance worth 8x your salary
• A great selection of additional benefits through our salary sacrifice scheme
• Access to an annual performance related bonus
• Access to training to help you develop and progress your career

Why work at Nationwide

We’re different from other financial service providers. We’re a building society, owned by our members. And for over 130 years, we’ve supported those members to make the most of their money and achieve what they want from life.

That’s reflected in the way we work here at Nationwide. We come together to make sure we’re doing things in the best way possible, both for each other and for our members. If you join us, you’ll be part of that. You’ll be able to help us build something really quite special. And you’ll have the opportunity to make a real difference.

On top of that, we always want you to be yourself. To use your skills and experience to make our Society stronger. To feel valued for who you are, not just what you do. Because here at Nationwide, we understand that we can do more together than we ever could alone.