Senior IT Strategy & Cloud Finance Leader

Lumen; Annapolis (MD); Remote; USD 167,000 - 223,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, Life & Voluntary Benefits

Bonus Structure

Job summary

Lumen, a trusted AI-powered connectivity leader, seeks a Principal, IT Strategy & Operations Manager to partner with Technology VPs, Finance, and leaders to shape IT strategy and translate technology investments into business value. You will own cloud program budgeting, forecasting, governance, and executive reporting.

This remote role emphasizes strong analytics, dashboards, and a track record influencing senior leaders across enterprise IT, finance, procurement, and vendors.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of progressive experience in IT strategy, technology finance, business operations, consulting, transformation, or related disciplines.
• Bachelor's degree in Business, Finance, Technology, Engineering, or a related field; advanced degree preferred.
• Strong financial acumen, including budgeting, forecasting, accruals, variance analysis, business cases, capital and expense management, accounting and investment governance.
• Strong knowledge of cloud economics, FinOps, cloud-provider billing, professional-services spend, procurement, invoicing and commitment management.
• Ability to connect technology strategy to business outcomes, operational efficiency, customer value and revenue impact.
• Experience influencing senior leaders and coordinating work across Technology, Finance, Procurement, Accounts Payable, vendors and business teams.
• Strong analytical, communication, executive-presentation and problem-solving skills; experience with dashboards, reporting, AI and automation.

Responsibilities

• IT strategy and business value: Partner with VPs to define transformation priorities, future-state capabilities, roadmaps, and investment choices.
• Identify how IT can improve customer outcomes, operational performance, and top-line growth, and translate recommendations into clear business cases and measurable outcomes.
• AI and operational efficiency: Identify and advance practical AI, automation, analytics, and process-improvement opportunities that reduce manual effort, improve decision quality, and increase productivity across the organization.
• Financial planning and governance: Manage cloud-program budgets, forecasts, milestones, funding requests, business cases, and actuals. Maintain alignment with Lumen Transformation Office, Finance, corporate planning and Long-Term Outlook requirements, and provide clear variance explanations and decision support.
• Professional services and forecasting: Coordinate professional-services funding requests and governance reviews, guide teams through procurement, maintain contract-level capital and expense forecasts, post monthly actuals, and prepare reporting for Cloud Program leadership.
• Executive & Organizational Operations: Maintain dashboards, scorecards, leadership decks and portfolio reporting.
• Lead cross-functional follow-through on priorities, risks, dependencies, and actions while continuously improving financial controls and operating processes.
• Cloud budget management as needed by providing support on monthly accruals; reconcile cloud-management data, provider invoices, actuals and minimum commitments; maintain commitment-attainment reporting; validate dashboards; and provide detailed cloud-spend analysis across AWS, Microsoft and Google.

Skills

IT strategy

Finance & budgeting

Executive reporting

Cross-functional leadership

Dashboards

AI and automation

Education

Bachelor's degree in Business/Finance/Technology

Advanced degree preferred

Job description

Lumen, a trusted AI-powered connectivity leader, seeks a Principal, IT Strategy & Operations Manager to partner with Technology VPs, Finance, and leaders to shape IT strategy and translate technology investments into business value. You will own cloud program budgeting, forecasting, governance, and executive reporting.

This remote role emphasizes strong analytics, dashboards, and a track record influencing senior leaders across enterprise IT, finance, procurement, and vendors.