Cloud FinOps Engineer

Published: 16th February 2023 Closing Date: 15th March 2023

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Our technology organization is transforming how we work at WestRock. We align with our businesses to deliver innovative solutions that:

• Address specific business challenges, integrate processes, and create great experiences
• Connect our work to shared goals that propel WestRock forward in the Digital Age
• Imagine how technology can advance the way we work by using disruptive technology

We are looking for forward thinking technologists that can accelerate our focus areas such as building stronger foundational technology capabilities, reducing complexity, employing digital transformation concepts, and leveraging disruptive technology.

The opportunity:

This Cloud FinOps Engineer will be an integral part of our Cloud Center of Excellence who is ready for a unique opportunity to be WestRock’s first technologist focused on both the finance and cloud technology disciplines. The ideal candidate is familiar with cloud hosting and cloud technologies with cost management processes in the cloud.

This position will be responsible for accurately processing and allocating the AWS accruals and month-end bill charges for all the Westrock Cloud accounts in a timely manner. The Cloud FinOps Engineer will also allocate charges based on usage to appropriate IT (Information Technology) Business partners and business units monthly. This person will interface with the organization’s Sr. Leadership evangelizing Cloud costing models for TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), Cloud Optimization, Cloud Cost Show backs and Cloud Charge Back strategies. This position will interface with multiple financial systems or applications of high complexity (complexity defined by size, technology used and system feeds and interfaces) with multiple concurrent users, ensuring control, integrity, and accessibility. The role will act as the Finance and Cloud Cost liaisons for cloud consumers e.g., (operations teams, Developers, IT Business partners, Engineers, and Architects) providing cost estimates and insight to upcoming budgeted implementations and strategies, including ongoing solutions run rate.  

How you will impact WestRock:

FinOps Program Implementation – 60%:

• Develop, measure, report and maintain key performance indicators for tracking real time costs, consumption, and metrics for product level visibility
• Executes deployment of costing templates for delivery of products and services financial requirements
• Enable product teams and end users to move towards self-service cloud cost reporting.
• Develop resource tagging strategy to create accountability related to shared cloud services expenses.
• Prioritizes work from multiple projects simultaneously.
• Works closely with Project Managers from other teams/departments to complete work.
• Operationalize FinOps frameworks, establish business processes in support of globally distributed teams, promote a culture of cost awareness and accountability
• Proactively creates and maintains tools for monitoring cost budgets and overages.
• Develop methods of Chargeback Reserved Instance and Savings Plan amortization values to appropriate divisions monthly
• Researches and analyzes business trends and behavioral data to identify opportunities for innovative cost savings and cost avoidance methods.

Management and Enablement – 30%:

• Experience building enterprise cloud cost management strategy for cloud adoption or driving the program’s evolution to meet new requirements.
• Leverages tooling and custom applications to monitor the operational status of applications, infrastructure, networks, databases, and security; optimizes and tunes performance as appropriate.
• Experience in process engineering to establish new processes and improve existing processes with a metrics driven approach.
• Manage the relationship between IT Business partners and the Cloud Center of Excellence to provide transparency into cloud usage and costs
• Partner with Strategic Sourcing and Finance to negotiate cloud contracts and other hosting opportunities.
• Evaluate emerging cost management tools/ optimization tools, processes, and frameworks, drive adoption of the best options
• Proposes cloud-related optimizations and best practices to improve reliability, performance, and cost.
• Experienced with cloud budget management process, cloud cost analytics and cloud cost optimization
• Partner with Finance, Operations and Engineering teams to implement cost optimization initiatives involving usage efficiencies, pricing efficiencies, deep dives into services such as compute, network, and storage usage
• Collaborates with product and project teams to understand needs and enable them with the cost to deploy supporting infrastructure.
• Participates in project planning and management across multiple efforts.
• Supports technology architecture design review efforts for project and product teams.
• Support Business Unit, Procurement, and other teams with subject matter expertise on forecasting and cloud costing models
• Create cloud cost, standards, procedures, and guidelines for engineering to consume
• Creates and improves design and training documentation.
• Develops and delivers formal cloud cost awareness training courses.

Learning – 10%:

• Keeps abreast of innovations and industry trends as well as changes to cloud ecosystem and determines how they impact the cost of solutions, projects, or budgets.
• Participates in and contributes to FinOps Foundation communities for learning activities around the concepts of cost and cloud usage ownership as core practices (share discoveries from communities of practice with the technology organizations).
• Proactively views articles, tutorials, and videos to learn about current cost management strategies and best practices being used within other technology organizations or manufacturing industries.
• Proactively engage cloud providers business office services, e.g., AWS CFM (Cloud Financial Management)- Cloud Financial Management, Azure Cloud Economics to stay current with cloud cost new features, innovation roadmaps and cloud cost reduction opportunities.

What you need to succeed:

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance or Computer Science or relevant work experience or equivalent military experience
• 4-8 years overall IT experience.
• Certifications: AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification (preferred), FinOps Practitioner Certification (preferred), Professional Certification (a plus) or equivalent Azure Certifications
• 3+ years of Enterprise-level cloud platform experience with Azure or AWS
• Proven experience will cloud providers infrastructure (network/compute), services, and usage models
• Proficiency in working as part of a collaborative, cross-functional, modern engineering team.
• Proven experiences are creating governance on cloud spend
• Budgeting and forecasting
• Proficiency in monitoring cloud spend
• Proficiency in reporting and tracking cloud spend
• Highly organized, thorough, self-starter who can work with multiple internal teams and project managers to deliver results.
• Have a Cloud-first attitude
• Build and deliver effective data driven presentations for various business partners on public cloud cost usage and spend insights.
• Continuously monitor public cloud provider discount commitments (like Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot, sustained use/committed use discounts) with the vital governance, processes, and tooling and ensure key coverage and utilization metrics are trending in the right direction
• Proven skillset in latest AWS services and/or Azure services and ability to monitor cost variability in a multi-cloud strategy
• Demonstratable knowledge around providing cloud consumers and stakeholders cost related insights, metrics, and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) related to their service costs
• Demonstrable skills building BI (Business Intelligence) dashboards (QuickSight, Power BI, Domo, Tableau, Cudos etc…)
• Proficient with building and improving forecasts and exploring trends related to Cloud Financial Management/Optimization tools), e.g., AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR), Cloudability, Flexera Optima, CloudHealth, Turbonomic, Densify
• Effective verbal/interpersonal and written communication skills, ability to communicate sophisticated technical topics to peers in a clear, concise manner
• Highly proficiency in MS Excel
• Proficient with traditional and Agile methodologies.
• Active membership in the FinOps Foundation (a plus)