FinOps Practitioner

Context

This role focuses on FinOps (Financial Operations) within a multi-cloud environment, emphasizing cloud financial governance, cost optimization, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, compliance, and collaboration across finance, engineering, and business teams. The position requires coordination and leadership of FinOps initiatives across the organization, ensuring alignment and communication between stakeholders with active C-level sponsorship.

Missions

• Monitor, analyze, and optimize multi-cloud usage and costs.
• Implement optimization techniques such as reserved instances, spot instances, autoscaling, and right-sizing.
• Define and enforce cloud financial governance standards, including tagging, cost allocation, and budget controls.
• Track vendor pricing changes and assess their impact on budgets and forecasts.
• Collaborate with finance teams to establish accurate cloud budgets and forecasts.
• Implement chargeback and showback models to align costs with consumption.
• Ensure cloud spend aligns with strategic and financial targets.
• Support cost scenario planning to evaluate business cases for cloud adoption.
• Produce actionable cost and usage reports for stakeholders at multiple levels (engineering leads, executives).
• Ensure compliance with Belgian and EU financial, security, and reporting regulations applicable to public companies.
• Define reporting standards to ensure transparency and predictability of cloud spend, aligned with the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS).
• Educate engineering and product teams on cost-aware design and FinOps principles.
• Partner with procurement to negotiate contracts, enterprise agreements, and discounts.
• Act as the translator between finance and technology, fostering a shared language and goals.
• Leverage FinOps tooling and automation to ensure effective monitoring, governance, and continuous optimization of cloud costs.
• Automate spend monitoring, anomaly detection, and reporting.
• Integrate FinOps practices into CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code.
• Lead the coordination and advancement of FinOps initiatives throughout the organization.
• Plan, prioritize, and follow up on FinOps improvement actions and optimization efforts across technology areas.
• Serve as the point of contact for FinOps matters, ensuring alignment and collaboration among finance, engineering, and business stakeholders.
• Create and update cost transparency and performance reports, including dashboards and insights to aid decision-making and prioritization of optimization opportunities.
• Promote FinOps priorities and initiatives across different platforms and teams by analyzing cost and usage data.
• Increase FinOps awareness and adoption by guiding stakeholders on cost-efficient practices and supporting consistent application of FinOps principles in planning and delivery processes.
• Ensure FinOps improvement actions are taken and priorities implemented, maintaining ongoing FinOps awareness and adoption.

Conformity Criteria

• Minimum 5 years of professional experience in FinOps.
• Holds valid FinOps Certified Practitioner and FinOps Certified FOCUS Analyst certifications issued by the FinOps Foundation.
• Demonstrable experience in enterprise Cloud, DataCenter, Licensing, IA, and SaaS budgeting and forecasting.
• Demonstrable experience with at least two hyperscalers (Azure mandatory).
• Demonstrable experience implementing showback or chargeback cost allocation models.
• Professional proficiency in English at C1 level.
• For this assignment, the contractor is required to be present at the company office up to five days per week. The required on-site presence may vary and will be communicated during the course of the assignment.

Evaluation Criteria

• Ability to define and enforce tagging and allocation standards ensuring accurate cost attribution.
• Ability to design and operate enterprise Cloud/DataCenter/Licensing/IA/SaaS budgeting and forecasting processes.
• Ability to build automated dashboards delivering reliable and actionable cost insights.
• Ability to design and optimize Reserved Instance and Savings Plan strategies.
• Ability to identify and deliver cost savings through rightsizing and idle resource elimination.
• Ability to implement showback or chargeback processes driving cost ownership.
• Ability to define and maintain FinOps processes, KPIs, and review cadences.
• Ability to train, mentor, and embed FinOps practices across engineering and finance teams.
• Ability to collaborate with procurement teams on contract negotiation, enterprise agreements, and discount strategies.
• Ability to ensure FinOps processes and reporting comply with Belgian and EU public sector financial and regulatory requirements.

1. Minimum 5 years of professional experience in FinOps
2. Holds a valid FinOps Certified Practitioner and FinOps Certified FOCUS Analyst certification issued by the FinOps Foundation
3. Demonstrable experience in enterprise Cloud, DataCenter, Licensing, IA and SaaS budgeting and forecasting
4. Demonstrable experience with at least two hyperscalers (Azure mandatory)
5. Demonstrable experience implementing showback or chargeback cost allocation models
6. Professional proficiency in English at C1 level
7. Ability to define and enforce tagging and allocation standards ensuring accurate cost attribution
8. Ability to design and operate enterprise Cloud/DC/Lic/IA/SaaS budgeting and forecasting processes
9. Ability to build automated dashboards delivering reliable and actionable cost insights
10. Ability to design and optimize Reserved Instance and Savings Plan strategies
11. Ability to identify and deliver cost savings through rightsizing and idle resource elimination
12. Ability to implement showback or chargeback processes driving cost ownership
13. Ability to define and maintain FinOps processes, KPIs and review cadences
14. Ability to train, mentor and embed FinOps practices across engineering and finance teams
15. Ability to collaborate with procurement teams on contract negotiation, enterprise agreements and discount strategies
16. Ability to ensure FinOps processes and reporting comply with Belgian and EU public sector financial and regulatory requirements