FinOps Practitioner

About the role:-

We are looking for a hands-on FinOps practitioner who can cut Azure spend measurably while building lasting cost accountability across engineering, finance and business teams. You will own cost visibility, optimization and governance for client Azure estates, typically USD 1M–40 M+ in annual spend.

The role blends technical depth in Azure with financial fluency. You will sit between cloud engineers and finance controllers, translating usage into business value and turning recommendations into executed savings.

Key responsibilities:-

Inform — visibility and allocation

• Build and maintain cost visibility using Azure Cost Management, Cost Exports to storage, and Power BI or FOCUS-aligned datasets.
• Design and enforce tagging, management group and subscription strategies that enable accurate showback and chargeback.
• Allocate shared costs (networking, AKS, shared databases, support plans) using fair, documented allocation models.
• Produce monthly cost reports, variance analysis and executive dashboards for finance and engineering stakeholders.
• Set up budgets, cost alerts and anomaly detection, and run the triage process when spikes occur.
• Reservation and savings plan planning.

Optimize — rates and usage:-

• Run rate optimization: Reserved Instances, Azure Savings Plans for compute, Azure Hybrid Benefit (Windows Server, SQL Server) and Dev/Test pricing.
• Model commitment coverage and utilization, and recommend purchase, exchange and renewal decisions.
• Drive usage optimization: VM and database rightsizing, idle and orphaned resource cleanup, storage tiering and lifecycle policies, scheduling of non-production workloads.
• Optimize PaaS and container spend, including AKS node pools, App Service plans, Azure SQL / Cosmos DB throughput, and Log Analytics ingestion and retention.
• Analyze data transfer, egress and networking costs, and propose architectural changes where they deliver sustained savings.
• Validate Azure Advisor recommendations and convert them into prioritized, owner-assigned backlogs with tracked savings.

Operate — governance and culture:-

• Implement cost guardrails using Azure Policy, RBAC and landing-zone standards (allowed SKUs, regions, mandatory tags).
• Embed cost estimation into delivery: review architecture designs and IaC (Bicep / Terraform) for cost impact before deployment.
• Run FinOps cadences: monthly cost reviews, optimization stand-ups and quarterly business reviews with clients.
• Support forecasting and budgeting with finance, including EA / MCA invoice reconciliation and amortized vs actual cost views.
• Define unit economics (cost per customer, transaction or environment) with product teams.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute playbooks, templates and accelerators to the FinOps practice.

Must-have skills and experience:-

Core focus areas for this role:

• Reservations and Savings Plans: hands-on purchase, exchange, refund and renewal of Azure Reservations and Savings Plans for compute; coverage and utilization analysis; break-even and commitment modelling; Azure Hybrid Benefit.
• Cost allocation: designing allocation models for shared services (networking, AKS, shared databases, support plans), amortizing commitment costs back to consuming teams, and using Azure cost allocation rules.
• Tagging: defining a tagging taxonomy (cost center, application, environment, owner), enforcing it through Azure Policy (deny, append, inherit tags), and remediating untagged spend.
• Cross charge (showback / chargeback): setting up showback and chargeback to business units, cross-charging shared and commitment costs, and reconciling internal recharges with finance.
• Billing understanding: strong grasp of EA, MCA and CSP agreements, billing accounts, profiles and invoice sections, amortized vs actual cost, Azure Prepayment, credits and marketplace charges, and monthly invoice reconciliation.

Also required:

• 5–7 years in IT, cloud operations or cloud finance, with 3+ years dedicated to Azure cost management or FinOps.
• Hands-on with Azure Cost Management + Billing, Cost Exports, Azure Advisor, Azure Policy and Resource Graph.
• Data skills to build cost reports: KQL, SQL and Power BI (or equivalent), plus Excel modelling for forecasts. ( Nice to Have)
• Scripting in PowerShell, Azure CLI or Python to automate tagging checks, cleanup and reporting.( Nice to Have)
• Working knowledge of the FinOps Framework and the FOCUS specification.
• FinOps Tools exp - Cloudability & Corestack.
• Track record of presenting savings and recommendations to engineering leads and finance stakeholders.