Cloud FinOps Engineer

📋 Description

• • Own the end-to-end FinOps lifecycle for a multi-cloud estate (Azure, AWS, GCP) that supports 100+ university partners and millions of student interactions. You will architect cost-intelligence into every layer of the stack, turning raw billing data into actionable insights that directly reduce spend and increase the affordability of online education.
• • Establish and enforce a global tagging taxonomy that is automatically validated at deploy-time via policy-as-code. Your governance framework will ensure every resource is traceable to a cost-center, product line, and university partner, eliminating shadow IT and enabling accurate chargeback.
• • Design unit-economics models that translate cloud spend into per-student, per-course, and per-degree metrics. These models will power executive dashboards used by CFOs and Deans to decide which programs to scale and which to sunset.
• • Build real-time cost visibility dashboards in tools such as Apptio Cloudability or Ternary, surfacing KPIs like cost-per-transaction, reserved-instance coverage, and anomaly alerts. Stakeholders from engineering to finance will rely on your dashboards daily to make fast, data-driven decisions.
• • Drive monthly cost-review rituals with engineering squads, presenting optimization opportunities that have already saved 15-20 % YoY. You will translate complex billing line-items into plain-English stories that motivate engineers to right-size, park, or modernize workloads.
• • Manage reserved-instance and committed-use discount portfolios worth millions of dollars. You will forecast usage curves, model break-even points, and negotiate with cloud vendors to lock in the lowest unit costs without stranding capacity.
• • Partner with procurement and legal to evaluate new SaaS FinOps tools, negotiate enterprise discounts, and ensure contracts include governance clauses for tagging, data retention, and audit rights.
• • Embed cost-guardrails into CI/CD pipelines so that every pull-request surfaces an estimated monthly run-rate before code is merged. This shift-left approach prevents budget overruns before they happen.
• • Support SOC 2, FERPA, and state-audit initiatives by providing immutable cost and asset logs that demonstrate compliance with data-residency and financial controls.
• • Champion a culture of FinOps literacy across 300+ technologists. You will host lunch-and-learns, publish internal blogs, and create self-service runbooks so every engineer can become a cost-optimizer.
• • Continuously scan the cloud provider roadmaps for new pricing models (e.g., AWS Savings Plans, Azure Spot VMs, GCP CUD Flex) and run controlled pilots to quantify real-world savings potential.
• • Contribute to the annual cloud budget and long-range financial plan, translating business growth scenarios into forecasted spend and headcount needs for the CTO and CFO.