Key Responsibilities
- Serve as a primary contact for engineering teams seeking cloud cost guidance, responding to questions in real time through Slack and other asynchronous channels.
- Proactively engage with high-spending R&D; teams to:
- Review monthly cloud spending.
- Identify cost optimization opportunities.
- Understand upcoming engineering roadmap plans and their potential cost implications.
- Capture meeting notes, recommendations, recurring questions, and emerging cost patterns.
- Monitor cloud and AI/LLM spending for anomalies, spikes, and inefficiencies.
- Investigate spending variances, produce written root-cause analyses, and recommend optimization opportunities to team owners.
- Document investigations in Jira and flag relevant findings for monthly reporting.
- Participate in monthly forecasting by:
- Reconciling central forecasts with team-level projections.
- Documenting discrepancies.
- Capturing team plans and anticipated spending.
- Contribute practitioner insights and team-sourced information, including AI/LLM cost drivers,
to Showback reporting and spending reviews.
Central budget ownership, vendor contract modeling, and platform/tooling engineering are outside the scope of this engagement.
Must-Have Skills
- Senior-level experience in FinOps (cloud financial operations).
- Strong expertise in cloud cost management and optimization.
- Proven ability to investigate spending anomalies and produce clear, written root-cause analyses.
- Experience advising and consulting directly with R&D; or engineering teams in a partner-facing capacity.
- Experience with cloud cost forecasting, including aligning central forecasts with team-level projections.
- Familiarity with OpenAI/LLM cost drivers and monitoring LLM spending.
- Experience with cost modeling and tracking team investments or projects.
- Proficiency with Jira for documenting investigations and Slack for real-time and asynchronous support.
- Experience maintaining technical documentation or wiki