FinOps / Cloud Cost Management Leader

Location: Remote - USA, Remote - Canada

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

A Moving Experience.

Key Responsibilities

Intake Governance

• All public cloud spend require FinOps approval, starting with established/approved budgets and requiring in-band spend provenance and out-of-band spend approvals.
• Ensure meticulous documentation of every budget change transaction.
• Ensure 100% compliance for every public cloud spend line item.
• Collaborate with budget owners in Engineering, R&D, PS, IT and Finance to allocate special funding requests.

Bottom-up Fiscal Year Budget

• Maintain and update reference data for fiscal year budget planning.
• Summarize and communicate budget plans to business stakeholders.
• Facilitate quarterly budget cycles and incremental spend approval with owners.

Spend Performance

• Lead review meetings to monitor cloud spend and add anomaly detection to the mix.
• Manage purchase orders (POs) for cloud resources.
• Oversee spend reporting and provide feedback to budget owners.
• Track changes to spend and ensure alignment with financial targets.
• Democratize spend performance in a way that aligns with stake holders from C-suite to engineers that implement changes that impact public cloud spend.

Cost Avoidance

• Approve and manage reserved instance purchases to optimize cloud costs.
• Communicate planned changes that may impact cash flow or spend performance.
• Monitor reserved instance utilization and drive realization of savings goals (ESR).
• Visualize coverage by SKU and support automation of cost calculations.
• Report on cost avoidance achievements and how those relate back to spend performance.

Executive Presence

• Demonstrate strong executive presence
• Ability to communicate effectively with senior leadership, influence decision-making, and represent the FinOps function confidently across various business units
• Showcases poise, credibility, and the capacity to inspire trust while driving strategic initiatives in a fast-evolving technology landscape

Business Unit Cost

• Democratize business unit cost at multiple layers of granularity as well as negotiate allocation strategies for common/shared costs so the business feels they are fair strategies.
• Facilitate pricing and modeling for new and existing products/features.
• Provide insights on true resource impact and technical changes affecting costs.

Estimation & Investigations

• Support product, sales, and engineering teams with estimation tasks for new services or features.
• Assist with investigations into cost anomalies and resource usage.

Skills & Qualifications

• Must be FinOps.org certified
• 5yrs experience in cloud financial operations (FinOps), budgeting, and cost management. Ideal candidate has established their own practice.
• Strong analytical and reporting skills.
• Ability to collaborate across technical and business teams.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP) and cost optimization strategies.
• Excellent communication and organizational skills.
• Experience with reporting platforms as well as backend data acquisition via API and data search/storage strategies (SQL, Prometheus, Parquet Files, Databricks, etc)
• Experience either evaluating or operating off-the-shelf FinOps tools such as CloudHealth, Cloudability, KubeCost, etc…
• Experience in K8s cost allocation strategies

Cerence Inc. (Nasdaq: CRNC and www.cerence.com) is the global industry leader in creating unique, moving experiences for the automotive world. Spun out from Nuance in October 2019, Cerence is a new, independent company that has quickly gained traction as a leader in the automotive voice assistant space, working with all of the world’s leading automakers – from Ford and Fiat Chrysler to Daimler, Audi and BMW to Geely and SAIC – to transform how a car feels, responds and learns. Its track record is built on more than 20 years of industry experience and leadership and more than 500 million cars on the road today across more than 70 languages.  

As Cerence looks to the future and continues an ambitious growth agenda, we need someone to join the team and help build the future of voice and AI in cars. This is an exciting opportunity to join Cerence’s passionate, dedicated, global team and be a part of meaningful innovation in a rapidly growing industry. 

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

Cerence is firmly committed to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and to compliance with all federal, state and local laws that prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of age, race, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sex, sex stereotyping, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, religion, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, citizenship status, sexual orientation, protected military or veteran status, genetic information and other protected classifications. Cerence Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

All prospective and current Employees need to remain vigilant when it comes to executing security policies in the workplace. This includes:

- Following workplace security protocols and training programs to familiarize with the ways to maintain a safe workplace.
- Following security procedures to report any suspicious activity.
- Having respect for corporate security procedures to allow those procedures to be effective.
- Adhering to company's compliance and regulations.
- Encouraging to follow a zero tolerance for workplace violence.

- Basic knowledge of information security and data privacy requirements (e.g., how to protect data & how to be handling this data).

- Demonstrative knowledge of information security through internal training programs.