FinOps Specialist – Databricks and Cloud

Position Summary

Infrastructure Services is seeking a FinOps Specialist to manage cost visibility, forecasting, financial governance, and optimization for a large-scale Databricks and cloud data platform.

This role will partner with engineering, operations, finance, procurement, and program leadership to monitor cloud consumption, identify savings opportunities, improve cost allocation, and ensure platform spending remains aligned with project and business objectives.

Key Responsibilities

• Monitor and analyze Databricks and cloud spending across workspaces, projects, teams, environments, and workloads.
• Track Databricks compute usage, SQL warehouses, jobs, storage, networking, and related cloud services.
• Identify idle, oversized, underutilized, or inefficient resources.
• Recommend improvements involving cluster sizing, autoscaling, job scheduling, serverless compute, storage, and workload design.
• Develop monthly, quarterly, and annual budgets and forecasts.
• Compare actual costs against budgets and investigate significant variances.
• Create cost-allocation models by client, project, contract, cost center, team, or data product.
• Support showback, chargeback, tagging, and resource-ownership standards.
• Build dashboards and reports covering spend, trends, forecasts, anomalies, savings, and commitment utilization.
• Configure budgets, thresholds, alerts, and financial guardrails.
• Review Databricks and cloud invoices for accuracy and reconcile charges against usage and contract terms.
• Evaluate reserved capacity, savings plans, committed-use discounts, and enterprise agreements.
• Maintain a register of optimization opportunities and track realized savings.
• Provide financial estimates for new workloads, migrations, proposals, and architectural changes.
• Help technical teams understand the financial impact of platform and engineering decisions.
• Support development of FinOps policies, procedures, and cost-aware engineering practices.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in finance, accounting, business, information technology, data analytics, or a related field.
• At least five years of experience in FinOps, cloud financial management, technology finance, or cloud cost optimization.
• Experience analyzing Databricks or other cloud data-platform costs.
• Experience with Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud pricing, billing, and cost-management tools.
• Strong knowledge of budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis, cost allocation, and optimization.
• Experience with showback, chargeback, tagging, invoice reconciliation, and commitment management.
• Strong Excel or financial-modeling skills.
• Ability to translate technical usage data into clear financial recommendations.
• Strong analytical, communication, reporting, and stakeholder-management skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• FinOps Certified Practitioner or FinOps Certified Professional.
• Hands-on experience with Databricks billing data, system tables, cluster policies, SQL warehouses, and serverless compute.
• Experience with Azure Cost Management, AWS Cost Explorer, Google Cloud Billing, Cloudability, CloudHealth, Flexera, Finout, or similar tools.
• Experience with Power BI, Tableau, SQL, Python, or Databricks SQL.
• Familiarity with data engineering, Apache Spark, Delta Lake, Terraform, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience supporting large enterprise, consulting, government, or regulated programs.
• Cloud or Databricks certification.