Manager - Customer Service Operations

We are seeking a Cloud FinOps Lead / Manager with strong Cloud Operations expertise to drive financial governance, operational excellence, and cost optimization across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments.

This role combines FinOps with Cloud Operations and DevOps/SRE principles to ensure cost-efficient, reliable, and scalable cloud platforms.

Key Responsibilities

1. Cloud Cost Management & Optimization

• Monitor, analyze, and optimize cloud spend across AWS, Azure, and/or GCP
• Identify and implement cost-saving opportunities:
• Rightsizing compute and storage
• Reserved Instances / Savings Plans
• Spot/Preemptible instances
• Scheduling (auto start/stop)
• Design and enforce tagging strategies for cost allocation
• Establish chargeback/showback models
• Drive continuous cost optimization initiatives across engineering teams

2. Cloud Operations & Service Delivery

• Manage end-to-end cloud operations (L2/L3 support) for production environments
• Ensure high availability, performance, and scalability of workloads
• Handle incident, problem, and change management (ITIL aligned)
• Lead troubleshooting and root cause analysis (RCA) for outages and performance issues
• Support capacity planning and resource utilization optimization

3. FinOps Framework & Governance

• Implement and mature FinOps practices aligned with FinOps Foundation (Inform, Optimize, Operate)
• Define and enforce:
• Cloud cost governance policies
• Budget controls and guardrails
• Approval workflows for resource provisioning
• Establish cost accountability culture across engineering and business teams
• Drive adoption of FinOps across multiple business units

4. Monitoring, Observability & Cost Intelligence

• Implement monitoring and observability solutions:
• AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, GCP Operations Suite
• Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar tools
• Correlate infrastructure performance with cost trends
• Configure alerts for:
• Cost anomalies
• Overutilized / underutilized resources
• Performance degradation
• Build dashboards combining operational + financial KPIs

5. Automation & DevOps Integration

• Integrate FinOps into CI/CD pipelines and DevOps workflows
• Enable:
• Auto-scaling
• Auto-healing
• Auto-shutdown policies
• Improve operational efficiency through automation and standardization

6. Financial Planning & Forecasting

• Develop and manage cloud budgets and forecasts
• Perform variance analysis (planned vs actual spend)
• Provide insights on cost drivers and optimization opportunities
• Align capacity planning with financial forecasts and business growth
• Support finance teams with cloud cost reporting during planning cycles

7. Security, Compliance & Governance

• Ensure adherence to cloud governance and compliance standards
• Implement guardrails for secure and cost-efficient deployments
• Collaborate with security teams for cost-optimized security architecture
• Conduct audits of cloud usage and spending

8. Stakeholder Management & Leadership

• Collaborate with:
• Cloud Engineering
• Finance and Procurement teams
• Product and Business stakeholders
• Present cost, performance, and operational insights to leadership
• Mentor and guide junior FinOps/CloudOps team members
• Drive cross-functional alignment on cost and operational efficiency goals

Required Skills & Qualifications

Experience

• 710 years of total IT experience
• 35+ years in Cloud FinOps / Cloud Cost Management + Cloud Operations
• Experience managing large-scale production cloud environments
• Exposure to multi-cloud environments preferred

Cloud Operations Expertise

• Strong hands-on experience in:
• Compute (EC2, VMs, Kubernetes AKS/EKS/GKE)
• Storage (S3, Azure Blob, Persistent Disks)
• Networking (VPC/VNet, Load Balancers, DNS, VPN, Firewalls)
• Experience in:
• Incident & problem management
• Root cause analysis (RCA)
• Capacity & performance management
• Backup & Disaster Recovery (DR)

FinOps & Financial Skills

• Deep understanding of FinOps lifecycle (Inform, Optimize, Operate)
• Expertise in:
• Budgeting and forecasting
• Cost allocation and tagging
• Unit economics (cost per user/transaction/service)
• Experience with cost optimization strategies and financial modeling

Technical Skills

• Cloud platforms: AWS / Azure / GCP
• Cost tools:
• AWS Cost Explorer, Savings Plans
• Azure Cost Management, Azure Advisory
• GCP Billing tools
• FinOps tools:
• Apptio Cloudability, CloudHealth, Flexera (good to have)
• Monitoring tools:
• CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Prometheus, Grafana
• Automation:
• Terraform, CloudFormation
• Python, PowerShell

Soft Skills

• Strong stakeholder communication and influencing skills
• Ability to translate technical metrics into financial insights
• Analytical and problem-solving mindset
• Leadership and mentoring capabilities

Preferred Certifications

• FinOps Certified Practitioner / Professional
• AWS / Azure / GCP Architect Certification
• ITIL Foundation (for operations alignment)

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

• % reduction in cloud spend and cost optimization achieved
• Cloud budget vs actual (forecast accuracy)
• SLA/SLO compliance
• Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)
• % of automated cloud operations tasks
• Adoption rate of FinOps practices across teams