Cloud FinOps Analyst – (Czech Republic Remote)

The Cloud FinOps Analyst will work with a wide range of stakeholders to promote a culture of cost accountability and awareness for Cloud and SaaS technology tooling. You will collaborate with engineering leaders and members of the finance team to develop and implement cost optimization initiatives, proactively monitoring spend fluctuations, discovering anomalies and seeking strategies for optimization. Key areas the role will support include: Amazon Web Services cost optimization, SaaS tooling analysis and rationalization, technology service invoice validation, technology microservices cost management via credit cards, and general assistance with budget, invoice tracking and reconciliation. This role is a highly visible and impactful position, and as such it will have the opportunity to educate and evangelize cloud cost optimization best practices across the Technology Organization.

Responsibilities:

• AWS Cloud Cost Optimization – Take ownership of Turnitin Cloud spend, and trends.
  • Weekly – Discover cost fluctuations, harmful trends, and unused resources
  • Monthly – Analyze and recommend compute saving plan adjustments, recommend reserved instances and calculation of break even points
  • Partner with Finance to procure the best reservation and or savings plan
  • Long term impact – Seek out and discover rightsizing opportunities and work with Engineering team to achieve changes intended to reduce cost overtime
  • Meet with Engineering leaders and evangelize and educate teams on Engineering impact on Cloud and tooling cost
  • Generate Monthly reports, by brand, and/or services
• Support technology leaders in understanding their total cloud and tooling cost of ownership based on their future product roadmap
• Take ownership of large contracts that have a consumption model. Maintain vigilance of the burn rate, raise concerns when the contracts are in risk of exceeding terms that result in overages.
• Oversee the measurement and reporting of vendor performance. Ensure that the metrics used to evaluate performance are properly tied to business outcomes and bias-free. Own delivery of performance feedback to vendors, and any corrective actions.
• Oversee contract renewal process with existing vendors and track progress toward contractual commitments. Maintain records of all contracts, renewal dates, and alert stakeholders when renewals are coming up.
• Serve as a point of escalation for vendor issues and disputes and drive those issues to resolution.
• Support negotiations of MSAs, SOWs, and pricing for products and/or services with new and existing vendors.
• Take ownership of the Operations line of credit, track spend, identify opportunities to reduce waste, work with Finance to reconcile monthly spend.
• Participate in business case development, cost modeling, TOC (Total Cost of Ownership) and trade-off exercise for new and existing products, services, and initiatives.

Minimum Requirements:

• Basic knowledge of AWS Cloud services or any Cloud provider would be a plus
• Knowledge of the core Finance principles and based understanding of the corporate account process (forecast, invoicing, accruals, etc)
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills with the ability to lead cross-team collaboration and partnerships across a variety of internal technology teams
• Ever curious about new technologies, ability to rapidly learn and understand new concepts and technologies.
• Deep analytical, critical thinking, and quantitative skills
• Strong organizational and project management skills
• Team player and self-driven with a transformation mindset.
• Experience working within an agile software development process.
• Experience tracking budget costs against actual spend
• Strong analytical, written and verbal; must be able to produce various reports (including ad-hoc reports) on costs optimization tools in a timely manner.
• Strong documentation skills: must be able to produce concise documentation on cloud cost optimization processes that are easily understood by a wide audience.

Preferred Requirements:

• Experience in Cloud cost optimization and in Cloud FinOps sector
• Possess an AWS Practitioner certification or ability to attain within 12 months
• Experience working closely with external IT vendors
• Hands-on experience in driving enhancements to existing as well as implementation of new cost tracking and report tools for visibility of cloud usage.
• Experience working in small to large teams to achieve project objectives and tasks under challenging deadlines, requiring successful collaboration and problem solving within team members.
• Strong Executive-level communication skills.