Managed Services Operations Lead - FinOps

AHEAD · United States

  • Senior
  • Full-time
  • $195,000 – $225,000
  • Posted 2026-09-16
  • Confirmed live on 25 September 2026

Apply at AHEAD

Job description

AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together advances in cloud infrastructure, automation and analytics, and software delivery, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation.
 
At AHEAD, we prioritize creating a culture of belonging, where all perspectives and voices are represented, valued, respected, and heard. We create spaces to empower everyone to speak up, make change, and drive the culture at AHEAD. 
 
We are an equal opportunity employer, and do not discriminate based on an individual's race, national origin, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law, whether actual or perceived. 
 
We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD. 

Duties / Responsibilities
Technical Leadership and Solution Design

• Serve as the primary technical escalation point for Cloud FinOps Engineers supporting client engagements, resolving the most complex technical and financial analysis scenarios.
• Act as principal engineer for high-complexity client situations requiring advanced cloud engineering, financial modeling, and cross-domain judgment.
• Lead the development, design, and implementation of complex, mission-critical, enterprise-grade FinOps solutions, including AI-enabled capabilities where they deliver measurable client value.
• Ensure FinOps services and deliverables are provided on time and at the highest quality standards while meeting or exceeding client expectations and contracted service commitments.
• Develop and maintain technical roadmaps and innovation plans for supported FinOps solutions and services.
• Establish project estimates and plans, identify risks and mitigations, and oversee the development and delivery of technical FinOps solutions.
• Provide technical leadership and coordinate technical delivery resources across skillsets, including cross-practice work and deliverables, without direct personnel-management responsibility.
• Provide credible time and effort estimates based on available information, and initiate and author project change requests when additional work is identified beyond agreed scope.

Cloud Cost Analysis and Optimization

• Lead deep-dive investigations into cloud spend drivers, billing anomalies, optimization opportunities, and cost visibility gaps across AWS, Azure, and GCP using native tooling and approved third-party FinOps platforms.
• Define the methodology by which the practice identifies, quantifies, prioritizes, and drives optimization opportunities including rightsizing, idle resource cleanup, storage and data transfer optimization, licensing alignment, and scheduling strategies.
• Own the framework for tracking optimization opportunities through identified, recommended, approved, implemented, and realized states, ensuring financial outcomes are validated and unrealized savings are not double-counted or misattributed.
• Set the approach for cost visibility and allocation in containerized and Kubernetes workloads, including shared cluster cost distribution, namespace and label-based allocation, and idle capacity analysis.
• Lead analysis and optimization of AI and GPU-related spend, including accelerated compute utilization, model training and inference costs, and consumption of managed AI and machine learning services.
• Extend cost analysis and governance to SaaS, software licensing, and marketplace spend where these fall within the agreed scope of the engagement.
• Define and oversee best-practices reviews that combine cost analysis with operational excellence analysis, using cloud-native and approved AHEAD tooling.

Allocation, Unit Economics, and Reporting Architecture

• Lead the design and implementation of scalable approaches for cost allocation, tagging strategy, showback, chargeback, budgeting, forecasting, and optimization across Azure, AWS, and GCP.
• Define unit economics and cost-per-unit metric frameworks that tie cloud spend to business drivers such as customers, transactions, environments, products, or workloads.
• Own the architecture of dashboards, reports, budgets, forecasts, executive summaries, and recurring service review content, and set quality standards for what the practice produces.
• Define data validation and reconciliation standards across billing exports, connectors, cost datasets, and reporting models to improve trust in reported values, including adoption of standardized billing data formats such as FOCUS.
• Establish continuous tagging governance through cloud-native policy enforcement, policy-as-code, and automated remediation, refining coverage as untagged or non-compliant resources are identified.
• Set standards for client-facing FinOps tooling and portals, ensuring predictive analytics, multi-account views, and resource, configuration, and environment chan

Prepare for the interview

Nothing collected for this employer yet. The Blind 75 is what technical screens draw from; practise it here, with a coach, in Java or Python.

More at AHEAD

All open software jobs