Senior IBM Apptio & Cloudability Administrator

Position summary

Varmoda is seeking a highly experienced Senior IBM Apptio & Cloudability Administrator to support a Federal technology program. This individual will serve in the combined roles of Technology Business Management Administrator (TBMA) and Cloudability Administrator and will become the primary hands-on administrator and subject matter expert for the customer's IBM Apptio Costing, Planning and Cloudability SaaS environment.

This is a customer-facing position embedded with the Client's program team. The selected individual will work closely with the Client, Varmoda, implementation partners and IBM Professional Services throughout an approximately 11-month implementation and will subsequently assume long-term responsibility for administration, operation and continuous improvement of the environment.

The program is dynamic and growing. As additional mission customers, applications, cloud workloads and services are onboarded, the scope and importance of the TBM and FinOps function are expected to grow substantially. This position is intended to evolve with the program and offers the opportunity to become the long-term technical and functional lead for Technology Business Management, IT financial management and FinOps.

Key Responsibilities

• Participate in the IBM Apptio and Cloudability implementation from project kickoff through production transition.
• Serve as Varmoda's primary technical and functional resource for Apptio and Cloudability.
• Work directly with IBM Professional Services during discovery, design, configuration, testing, validation, enablement and transition activities.
• Develop detailed knowledge of how the Apptio environment is configured and why specific design, allocation and reporting decisions were made.
• Coordinate with Government, Partners and subject matter experts to acquire required financial, operational, organizational and cloud data.
• Review and validate data for completeness, accuracy and suitability for use within Apptio.
• Validate IBM-configured data models, mappings, allocation methodologies, calculations, dashboards and reports.
• Participate in configuration and validation of the Apptio Costing and Planning environments.
• Participate in Application, Service and Infrastructure TCO configuration and validation.
• Participate in configuration and validation of Business Unit Showback and future chargeback capabilities.
• Participate in Cloudability configuration, including account organization, business mappings, tags, reporting, cost visibility and optimization functionality.
• Participate in FinOps use-case configuration including cost allocation, rightsizing, anomaly detection, commitments, budgeting and forecasting as applicable.
• Participate in Datalink configuration and learn to independently configure, maintain and troubleshoot Datalink connectors.
• Participate in end-to-end integration testing and recurring data-load validation.
• Review and validate user permissions, administrative configuration and row-level security.
• Participate in IBM knowledge-transfer and enablement sessions.
• Complete applicable IBM Apptio training.
• Review, maintain and ultimately assume ownership of IBM's Operational Runbook and related system documentation.
• Support production promotion and operational-readiness activities.
• Participate in project closeout and transition to IBM Customer Success and ongoing operations.
• Administer Apptio Costing, Planning and Cloudability.
• Monitor and maintain recurring data loads and Datalink integrations.
• Validate and reconcile financial, operational and cloud data.
• Maintain ATUM mappings, organizational structures, allocation rules and cost models.
• Maintain application, service and infrastructure TCO models.
• Produce and maintain showback and chargeback reporting.
• Support recurring financial reporting, budgeting, forecasting and variance analysis.
• Maintain dashboards and management reporting.
• Administer Cloudability FinOps reporting and analytics.
• Review AWS consumption trends and cost anomalies.
• Analyze rightsizing opportunities and cloud commitment utilization.
• Support Savings Plan and reservation analysis where applicable.
• Work with application and cloud teams to explain consumption and identify optimization opportunities.
• Manage users, permissions and administrative configurations.
• Troubleshoot data, reporting and platform issues.
• Coordinate issues and enhancements with IBM Support and IBM Customer Success.
• Maintain operational documentation and configuration records.
• Support audits and financial-data traceability as required.
• Recommend enhancements to the Client's TBM, ITFM and FinOps practices.
• Onboard new mission customers into Apptio and Cloudability.
• Incorporate new AWS accounts, applications, services and workloads into the financial model.
• Develop customer-specific showback and chargeback reporting.
• Incorporate additional labor, vendor, software, infrastructure and service costs.
• Create and maintain additional Datalink integrations.
• Expand allocation models as the service catalog matures.
• Expand TCO modeling across new applications and services.
• Support increasingly sophisticated budgeting and forecasting.
• Develop service rates and consumption-based charging methodologies.
• Expand FinOps governance as AWS consumption increases.
• Identify opportunities for cost avoidance and optimization.
• Help mission customers understand the relationship between technology consumption and cost.
• Support program leadership with financial analytics and decision-support information.
• Help mature the program from foundational cost transparency to a comprehensive TBM, FinOps and service-cost-management capability.

Required Qualifications

• Active U.S. Government Secret security clearance.
• Minimum 5 years of hands-on experience administering IBM Apptio SaaS solutions.
• Demonstrated production administration experience with IBM Apptio Costing / Cost Transparency.
• Hands-on experience with IBM Apptio Planning.
• Hands-on administration experience with IBM Apptio Cloudability.
• Strong understanding of the Technology Business Management framework and Apptio TBM Unified Model (ATUM).
• Strong understanding of FinOps principles and cloud financial management.
• Experience developing and maintaining IT cost models, allocation methodologies, showback or chargeback reporting and financial dashboards.
• Experience with cloud cost and usage data, preferably AWS.
• Experience acquiring, normalizing, reconciling and validating financial and operational data from multiple enterprise data sources.
• Experience maintaining Apptio data integrations, data models, reporting and recurring operational processes.
• Ability to work directly with financial personnel, cloud engineers, application teams, program managers and executive stakeholders.
• Strong analytical, communication, documentation and customer-facing skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience administering the Federal/FedRAMP-authorized versions of IBM Apptio and Cloudability.
• Experience supporting IBM Apptio within a Department of Defense or other U.S. Federal Government environment.
• Experience with AWS GovCloud billing, account structures, cost allocation and tagging.
• Experience with Apptio Datalink, including configuration and maintenance of automated data integrations.
• Experience implementing or maintaining customer-facing showback and chargeback models.
• Experience with application, service and infrastructure Total Cost of Ownership modeling.
• IBM Apptio certifications.
• TBM Council certification.
• FinOps Foundation certification.
• Experience supporting a shared-services, managed-services, cloud-hosting or multi-customer environment.
• Experience with Savings Plans and reservation analysis.
• Experience supporting cloud cost optimization, anomaly detection, rightsizing, budgeting and forecasting.

Certifications & Clearance

• Active U.S. Government Secret security clearance required.
• IBM Apptio certifications are highly preferred.
• TBM Council certification is highly preferred.
• FinOps Foundation certification is highly preferred.