# Associate Director, FinOps

## About the Role

The Associate Director, FinOps will establish, scale, and lead the enterprise FinOps practice across cloud and on-premises technology environments. The role will embed financial accountability, cost transparency, and value optimization into technology consumption, design, and governance.

Serving as a senior connection point between Finance, Platform, and Application teams, this position will lead cost visibility, showback and chargeback, spend governance, savings initiatives, and cost-aware architecture practices.

The role will also partner with cloud and infrastructure vendors, support hybrid-environment lifecycle management, and build lasting cost awareness across technical and business teams.

## Key Responsibilities

– Establish and lead the enterprise FinOps operating model across cloud and on-premises estates.
– Deliver cost visibility, reporting, dashboards, KPIs, and unit-economics metrics for Finance, Platform, and Application teams.
– Design showback models and chargeback frameworks for allocating costs to business units, products, and services.
– Define and enforce budgets, thresholds, tagging standards, approval controls, and spend governance policies.
– Lead budgeting, forecasting, variance management, and investigation of anomalies, cost drift, and unallocated spend.
– Manage commitment-based savings strategies, including reserved instances, savings plans, committed-use discounts, and enterprise agreements.
– Drive rightsizing, waste elimination, idle-resource reclamation, storage tiering, and utilization improvements.
– Establish cost-aware design guidelines, reference patterns, and architectural standards; review major designs for cost impact.
– Manage on-premises infrastructure and asset lifecycle activities, including capacity planning, refresh cycles, depreciation, decommissioning, and total cost of ownership.
– Partner with Finance, Architecture, Platform, Application, procurement, and vendor teams to improve cost governance and commercial outcomes.
– Deliver training, enablement, and communications that strengthen cost awareness and accountability.

## Required Skills

– 10–12+ years of experience in FinOps, IT financial management, technology cost optimization, or cloud and infrastructure financial governance.
– Experience in a senior or lead capacity.
– Proven experience establishing, scaling, or leading an enterprise FinOps practice across cloud and on-premises environments.
– Hands-on expertise in cost management across AWS, Azure, GCP, on-premises data centers, software licensing, and infrastructure lifecycle economics.
– Expertise in reserved instances, savings plans, committed-use discounts, rate optimization, and realized-savings management.
– Strong knowledge of showback, chargeback, budgeting, forecasting, unit economics, and spend governance.
– Ability to connect technology costs with business value.
– Advanced stakeholder-management skills across Finance, Platform, and Application teams.
– Experience working with cloud and infrastructure vendors on cost and governance strategies.
– Ability to drive cost awareness and accountability across decentralized technical and business teams.
– Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Engineering, Computer Science, Business Administration, or a related discipline.

## Preferred Skills

– Master’s degree, such as an MBA or MSc in Finance or Technology Management.
– FinOps Certified Practitioner or Professional certification.
– AWS, Azure, or GCP cloud cost or cloud architecture certification.
– IT asset management or ITIL certification.

## Cloud Platforms & Technologies

### Cloud Providers

– AWS
– Microsoft Azure
– Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

### Environments

– On-premises data centers
– Hybrid cloud environments

### Financial and Governance Practices

– FinOps
– Showback and chargeback
– Reserved instances
– Savings plans
– Committed-use discounts
– Enterprise agreements
– Unit economics
– Total cost of ownership (TCO)
– Software licensing and infrastructure lifecycle management

## FinOps Responsibilities

– Build cost visibility across cloud and on-premises technology estates.
– Produce financial reporting, dashboards, KPIs, and unit-economics metrics.
– Allocate technology costs through showback and chargeback models.
– Manage budgets, forecasts, thresholds, tagging standards, approval controls, and variance tracking.
– Identify anomalies, cost drift, untagged spend, and unaccountable costs.
– Build and manage commitment portfolios, optimizing coverage, utilization, and renewals.
– Develop vendor and procurement strategies for rate, discount, and commercial savings.
– Track optimization backlogs, savings targets, and realized versus potential savings.
– Apply rightsizing, waste elimination, idle-resource reclamation, storage tiering, and utilization improvements.
– Embed cost considerations into architecture, design reviews, and technology standards.
– Govern capacity planning, refresh cycles, depreciation, decommissioning, and TCO across on-premises infrastructure.
– Improve cost accountability through stakeholder engagement, training, and FinOps adoption.

## Why You Might Be Interested

This role offers the opportunity to lead an enterprise FinOps practice across both cloud and on-premises environments. It combines financial governance, architecture, optimization, vendor strategy, and cross-functional leadership. The position also provides scope to establish cost-aware design standards and influence how technology value is measured and managed across the organization.