AI ROI Consultant

Socket.dev; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

CloudZero is building an AI ROI Services practice and seeks an AI ROI Consultant who will own the business case and methodology for each engagement, turning spend data into defensible ROI numbers and a compelling story for executives.

You’ll work with data analytics, operations, and finance stakeholders to pre-register success criteria, quantify separable returns, and help productize repeatable methodologies as the practice scales.

Qualifications

• 7+ years at top-tier strategy or management consulting or equivalent in-house strategy experience, at Staff or Principal level.
• Experience building a business case for B2B SaaS environments and defending numbers to executives.
• Strong financial modeling and ROI/payback math skills and confounder identification.
• Executive presence enabling CFO-level conversations.
• Comfort operating with minimal structure in a fast-moving, evolving practice.
• Experience translating AI adoption value into business outcomes for non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own the business case and ROI methodology for each engagement from start to finish.
• Translate activity-to-return data into defensible dollarized value, ratio, and payback period.
• Separate operational vs strategic returns and apply rigorous analysis to each.
• Pre-register success criteria and pre-empt confounders before engagements.
• Collaborate with data analysts, spend data, and operations on data plumbing.
• Work with FDE to ensure integrations capture required methodology.
• Present calculations clearly for CFO conversations with thought leadership.
• Productize repeatable parts of the process to accelerate future engagements.

Skills

Strategy consulting

Financial modeling

Executive presence

AI/ML concepts

SaaS ROI

Data storytelling

Stakeholder management

Education

Bachelor's degree

MBA or advanced quantitative degree

Tools

Claude AI

ROI modeling tools

Excel

Job description

The Role

CloudZero is building a new practice: AI ROI Services. It's a repeatable engagement that installs measurement scaffolding for a customer's AI spend, then produces a calculation that survives a CFO's questions. We're writing the first two chapters of that playbook on ourselves, with our own Customer Success team as customer zero.

The AI ROI Consultant owns the business case and the methodology, engagement by engagement. You'll take attribution data (who spent what, on what, and what it produced) and turn it into a number finance teams trust: a ratio, a payback period, and a story that holds up.

This is a build-it-as-you-go role. The methodology exists in draft form today; you'll be the one who pressure-tests it against real customers and makes it repeatable.

What You'll Do

• Own the business case and ROI methodology for each engagement, start to finish.




• Turn the Activity-to-Return catalog into a defensible calculation: dollarized operational value over AI investment, expressed as a ratio and a payback period.




• Separate operational returns (time and capacity freed, easy to claim) from strategic returns (retention, ARR per TAM, harder to attribute), and apply the right rigor to each.




• Pre-register what counts as success before an engagement starts, and name the confounders up front, not after the fact.




• Partner with the data analyst joining spend, activity, and outcome data, and with Operations on the plumbing behind the numbers.




• Work with the FDE team so integrations capture what the methodology actually needs.




• Present the calculation in a form that holds up in a CFO conversation, with thought leadership and advisory as the captivating thread.




• Help productize what's repeatable, so each new engagement gets faster.

Who You'll Work With

• Reports to the SVP of Customer Success.




• Partners daily with CS Operations, TAMs, Product, and the FDE team.




• Works directly with customer stakeholders in finance, operations, and executive sponsorship to defend the ROI number.

What You'll Bring

• 7+ years at a top-tier strategy or management consulting firm (McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte, Accenture, or equivalent), or comparable in-house strategy experience, at a Staff or Principal level. You've personally owned the business case and defended the number to a skeptical executive, not supported someone else who did.




• A track record of building the business case for B2B SaaS software environments: structuring an ambiguous problem into a hypothesis, testing it, and defending the answer to a skeptical executive.




• Sharp quantitative and financial modeling skills: ROI and payback math, cohort analysis, sensitivity testing, and naming confounders before someone else does.




• Executive presence. You can walk a CFO through a number, take the hard question, and not flinch.




• Bachelor's degree required; MBA or another advanced quantitative degree is a strong plus.




• Comfort operating with minimal structure. This practice is being built in real time, and the playbook isn't fully written yet.




• Fluent in AI-native workflows: you use tools like Claude day to day to structure analysis, manage a fast-moving workstream, and turn ambiguous inputs into a clean deliverable; leading by example on AI expertise translating to business ROI.




• Experience advising customers or internal stakeholders through AI adoption: translating what the technology can do into what it's worth, in language a non-technical exec or finance partner trusts.




• Comfortable defining and refining a taxonomy (event types, activity classifiers, cohort logic) as the underlying tooling and data model mature, rather than waiting for a finished spec.




• Experience with software spend analysis, SaaS metrics, or customer success data; AI spend analysis a bonus.

About CloudZero

CloudZero is the AI ROI Company. We built the financial control plane for AI: the system finance, IT, and engineering use to connect every AI dollar to the outcome it produced. Across every provider. In real time. AI spend is the fastest-growing line on enterprise P&Ls and the least understood. Only 14% of CFOs can prove AI ROI today. CloudZero answers the question no one else can: what did it cost to produce this outcome, for this customer, on this model.

The largest cloud spenders on the planet already run on CloudZero, including Coinbase, Duolingo, DoorDash, and Shutterstock. We processed 14 trillion billing events in the last twelve months. We're the first listed partner on Anthropic's cost and usage API. We've raised over $119 million, including a $56 million Series C backed by leading venture capital firms.

Why Join Our Team?

At CloudZero, you’ll find a collaborative, fast-moving environment where your work makes a direct impact. We’re a team that values ownership, creativity, and curiosity — and we’re tackling some of the most complex challenges in the cloud space. If you’re excited by working with cutting-edge technology, driving meaningful outcomes, and growing with a company that’s scaling fast, we’d love to hear from you!