Finops Lead

ClifyX Inc; North Carolina; Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

ClifyX Inc. is seeking a FinOps practitioner to own cloud cost forecasting and spend tracking across a multi-cloud estate.

You will be the primary owner of spend visibility and forecasts, collaborating with engineering, IT finance, and business planning to align numbers and communicate to executive leadership without rework. The role emphasizes cross-functional alignment, insights into cost drivers, and delivering concise narratives for senior stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated hands-on FinOps or cloud financial management experience in multi-cloud environments.
• Familiarity with native cloud cost tooling (AWS/Azure/GCP) and third-party platforms is a plus.
• Strong forecasting and variance analysis with ability to explain drivers in business terms.

Responsibilities

• Forecast and maintain monthly and quarterly cloud spend forecasts across AWS, Azure and GCP accounts.
• Track spend vs forecast and budget, explain variances in business terms.
• Provide executive-ready summaries and presentations with clear narratives and key metrics.

Skills

FinOps

Forecasting

Executive reporting

Cross-functional collaboration

Cloud cost tooling

Tools

AWS Cost Explorer

Azure Cost Management

GCP Billing

BigQuery exports

CloudHealth / Flexera

Job description

Location: Charlotte NC & St Louis MO (Hybrid onsite)

Duration: 12+Months Contract

JD

FinOps practitioner to own cloud cost forecasting and spend tracking across our multi-cloud estate. This person will be the single point of accountability for knowing what we are spending, what we will spend, and why the two differ. The role is highly cross-functional: it requires working directly with engineering, IT finance, and business planning groups to keep forecasts aligned, and packaging results into summaries that go straight to executive leadership without rework.

Key responsibilities

Forecasting and spend tracking

• Build and maintain monthly and quarterly cloud spend forecasts for all in-scope AWS, Azure, and GCP accounts
• Track actual spend against forecast and budget, identify variances early, and explain drivers in business terms
• Maintain cost visibility at the account, service, environment, and application level, including tagging and allocation hygiene
• Flag anomalies and unexpected growth, and drive them to resolution with the owning teams

Cross-team alignment

• Partner with the Cloud Build team on planned workload changes, migrations, and new infrastructure so their roadmap is reflected in the forecast before it hits the bill
• Coordinate with the SDIT FinOps team, whose spend tracking sits at the SDIT level, to keep reporting reconciled and avoid conflicting numbers
• Work with the Business Planning teams to align cloud forecasts to budget cycles, planning assumptions, and funding decisions

Executive reporting

• Produce recurring and ad hoc summaries that are ready for executive consumption: clear narrative, the two or three numbers that matter, and a recommendation
• Present findings directly to senior stakeholders and defend the assumptions behind them

Optimization

• Identify savings opportunities across commitment coverage (Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, CUDs), rightsizing, storage tiering, idle resources, and license positioning
• Quantify the opportunity, socialize it with the responsible team, and track realized savings

Required qualifications

• Demonstrated hands‑on FinOps or cloud financial management experience, ideally in a multi‑cloud environment
• Working knowledge of the native cost tooling: AWS Cost Explorer and CUR, Azure Cost Management, GCP Billing and BigQuery exports; experience with a third‑party platform (Apptio Cloudability, CloudHealth, Flexera) is a plus
• Strong forecasting and variance analysis skills, with the judgment to distinguish a real trend from noise
• Credibility with senior technical and finance stakeholders; this person needs to walk into a room with senior engineers and senior finance partners and hold their own in both conversations
• Excellent written communication, with a track record of producing material used at the executive level
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity and incomplete data, and able to ramp quickly given the urgency of the need

Preferred

• Experience with unit economics and showback/chargeback models
• Familiarity with enterprise IT financial structures where central IT spend is tracked separately from business unit spend