FinOps Specialist – Databricks and Cloud

Key Responsibilities

* Monitor and analyze Databricks and cloud spending across workspaces, projects, teams, environments, and workloads.
* Track Databricks compute usage, SQL warehouses, jobs, storage, networking, and related cloud services.
* Identify idle, oversized, underutilized, or inefficient resources.
* Recommend improvements involving cluster sizing, autoscaling, job scheduling, serverless compute, storage, and workload design.
* Develop monthly, quarterly, and annual budgets and forecasts.
* Compare actual costs against budgets and investigate significant variances.
* Create cost-allocation models by client, project, contract, cost center, team, or data product.
* Support showback, chargeback, tagging, and resource-ownership standards.
* Build dashboards and reports covering spend, trends, forecasts, anomalies, savings, and commitment utilization.
* Configure budgets, thresholds, alerts, and financial guardrails.
* Review Databricks and cloud invoices for accuracy and reconcile charges against usage and contract terms.
* Evaluate reserved capacity, savings plans, committed-use discounts, and enterprise agreements.
* Maintain a register of optimization opportunities and track realized savings.
* Provide financial estimates for new workloads, migrations, proposals, and architectural changes.
* Help technical teams understand the financial impact of platform and engineering decisions.
* Support development of FinOps policies, procedures, and cost-aware engineering practices.

Required Qualifications

* Bachelor’s degree in finance, accounting, business, information technology, data analytics, or a related field.
* At least five years of experience in FinOps, cloud financial management, technology finance, or cloud cost optimization.
* Experience analyzing Databricks or other cloud data-platform costs.
* Experience with Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud pricing, billing, and cost-management tools.
* Strong knowledge of budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis, cost allocation, and optimization.
* Experience with showback, chargeback, tagging, invoice reconciliation, and commitment management.
* Strong Excel or financial-modeling skills.
* Ability to translate technical usage data into clear financial recommendations.
* Strong analytical, communication, reporting, and stakeholder-management skills.

Preferred Qualifications

* FinOps Certified Practitioner or FinOps Certified Professional.
* Hands-on experience with Databricks billing data, system tables, cluster policies, SQL warehouses, and serverless compute.
* Experience with Azure Cost Management, AWS Cost Explorer, Google Cloud Billing, Cloudability, CloudHealth, Flexera, Finout, or similar tools.
* Experience with Power BI, Tableau, SQL, Python, or Databricks SQL.
* Familiarity with data engineering, Apache Spark, Delta Lake, Terraform, and infrastructure as code.
* Experience supporting large enterprise, consulting, government, or regulated programs.
* Cloud or Databricks certification.