Principal Cloud Cost Optimization Analyst

Position Responsibilities:

The Cloud Cost Optimization Analyst is responsible for supporting the end-to-end lifecycle for cloud financial management (FinOps Practice) across Deltek including cloud spend, forecasting, and optimization. Deltek is looking for a candidate with demonstrated experience in Analyzing and supporting Cloud FinOps capabilities. This person will be responsible for working with a range of internal stakeholders to design, develop, and manage reports dashboards. You will help ensure the operational success of Deltek’s cloud expansion strategy. The ideal candidate will need strong analytics, cross-team collaboration, and multi-tasking skills that can execute and deliver quickly.

Roles & Responsibilities:

• Prepare and manage a monthly presentation for cloud costs against plan and forecast for finance and project managers.
• Assist in the planning for, evaluation, and implementation of cloud consumption management tools and solutions.
• Has a financial understanding of vendor management principles and cost models development.
• Excellent communicator with the ability to present complex technical and financial solutions in a simplified straightforward approach.
• Ability to work with and support cross-functional teams consuming cloud services to understand issues in spend and opportunities for savings and best practices around consumption of cloud services.
• Drive cost optimization efforts by collaborating with Finance and Engineering teams across the enterprise, recommending and purchasing reserved instances & savings plans across Azure, AWS, and GCP.
• Partner with our Cloud Governance Team to ensure appropriate tagging and alerts strategies are deployed and maintained at scale to manage costs.
• Responsible for partnering with the infrastructure, engineering, and product teams to understand the cloud demand forecast and daily resource management.
• Develop and maintain cost and forecasting models to provide required insights to current and future cloud spend.
• Developing and maintaining relationships with key customer stakeholders to onboard them with FinOps tools and processes.
• Develop and maintain KPIs, scorecards, and standard metrics.
• Drive optimization through discovery, development, and sharing of cost-saving opportunities e.g., translating financial insights into actionable recommendations, promoting cost-aware architecture design, and leveraging code to automate resource optimization. In this capacity, it is critical that you have high learning agility, ability to influence without authority, communication skills, and enjoy educating/guiding others.
• Leverage the FinOps tools, interpret the findings, and make technical recommendations to the business application teams to help reduce ongoing cost.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s Degree in finance, Computer Science, or Information Systems.
• 4+ years of professional experience Cloud Advisory & IT Financial Services or Operational Experience with Cloud Cost Governance within an IT Organization.
• Experience and working knowledge of native cloud cost management tooling and/or third-party cloud management or optimization platforms.
• Experience in working within FinOps subject area within a large enterprise.
• Prior experience building custom reports.
• Cost management knowledge including but not limited to chargeback modeling, cost savings and avoidance tracking, trending and variance analysis and forecasting.
• Practical knowledge of native cloud provider cost management capabilities and pricing models.
• Experience with third-party cloud aggregator software with direct experience in anomaly detection, capacity planning and rightsizing, tagging and storage lifecycle policies, and automation.
• Analytical skills to collect, coordinate and present sophisticated data to a variety of audiences.
• Experience in developing KPI’s and scorecards based on internal and industry benchmarks.
• Ability to drive change management ideas and experience to increase program success.
• Results-driven and goal-oriented.
• Analytical Thinker with solid communication and collaboration skills.
• Passion for presenting, training, and teaching, with a strong work ethic and positive attitude.
• FinOps Certified Cloud Practitioner certification is a plus.
• AWS or Azure cloud practitioner certifications.