Manager - Public Cloud FinOps & Cloud Operations Lead

Job Description:

Public Cloud FinOps + Cloud Operations Lead (7-10 Years Experience)

Role Overview 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

7-10 years of total IT experience

3-5+ 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