FinOps Specialist and Cloud Optimization

Detailed Job Description:

Hiring Manager Note:

1. FinOps for AI Consumption
2. AI for FinOps

FinOps for AI Consumption:

• The consultant will partner with AI, product, engineering, architecture, finance, and business teams to establish an enterprise framework for AI governance, cost optimization, and value realization. Key responsibilities include:
• Defining model routing, tagging, caching, guardrails, spend controls, and observability standards
• Building metrics and dashboards to measure AI adoption, usage, costs, and business outcomes
• Creating a scalable operating model that enables leadership to understand:
• Who is using AI
• How much it costs
• How efficiently it is being used
• What value it delivers

AI for FinOps:

The ideal candidate should also have hands-on experience leveraging AI to enhance FinOps functions, including:

• Anomaly detection
• Reporting and analytics
• Cost estimation
• Workload optimization
• Rate optimization

Senior System Engineer (FinOps)

Location: Bethesda, MD 20814 (Remote Possible 1 day/week to office)

Duration: CTH (Contracts to hire possible), 6-12 months of contracts initially

The Senior Systems Engineer will be a technical expert responsible for driving measurable savings and financial accountability across public cloud platforms by engineering automation for tagging compliance, budget & anomaly guardrails, and workload optimization.

This role will be responsible for enabling cost transparency, optimization, forecasting, chargeback/showback, anomaly detection, and unit economics across public cloud, container platforms, data services, and emerging AI/GenAI workloads.

The position will partner with Engineering, Finance, Product, Architecture, Security, Procurement, and AI/ML teams to build scalable FinOps capabilities that improve financial accountability, optimize cloud and AI consumption, and connect technology spend to measurable business value. This position requires a strong blend of cloud engineering, financial analytics, automation, AI/ML cost management, and stakeholder leadership.

Required

• Bachelor s degree in an engineering or computer science discipline and/or equivalent experience/certification
• 7+ years experience in information technology including experience in Cloud technologies (AWS, AliCloud, Azure), OS scripting, automation (e.g. Python, Bash)
• 3+ years of experience in developing and implementing FinOps/Cloud Cost Optimization strategies

Preferred

• Excellent problem-solving skills by working independently and through leading outcomes for cross functional teams
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills for a wide range of audiences including executives, business stakeholders and IT teams
• Familiarity with services such as Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, Google Vertex AI, OpenAI APIs, Anthropic, Databricks, Snowflake AI, or similar platforms

Responsibilities:

• Analyzes cloud usage - Monitoring cloud usage patterns, resource utilization, and spending to identify areas for improvement
• Designs and implements AI-enabled FinOps capabilities for cloud cost visibility, forecasting, anomaly detection, optimization recommendations, and executive reporting
• Establishes FinOps governance for AI/ML and GenAI workloads, including cost allocation, usage tracking, forecasting, budgeting, and optimization
• Analyzes, optimizing, and implementing cost optimization actions across different cloud services
• Implements and manages automated tools to help identify cost trends and anomalies
• Collaborating with teams - Working with finance and business teams to align cloud spending with budgetary constraints
• Provides technical leadership, oversight, governance and direction for services related to client s solution delivery
• Provides technical expertise to project team for successful project and change implementations
• Determines customer requirements and works with sourced resources to develop solutions
• Leads analysis of current environment for deficiencies and provides solutions
• Provides input into lifecycle, improvement, and standardization strategies
• Develops and generates periodic utilization reports to provide visibility to performance, capacity, availability and SLA management
• Utilize capacity data to model future state planning with overall strategy and goals
• Provides and presents status, analysis and reporting to internal stakeholders, Executive Management and Senior Leadership
• Trains and/or mentors other team members, and peers as appropriate

Mindlance is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate in employment on the basis of Minority/Gender/Disability/Religion/LGBTQI/Age/Veterans.