Azure FinOps & Cloud Cost Analyst
Azure billing and cost visibility
- Monitor daily, weekly, and monthly Azure consumption, charges, credits, commitments, and spending trends.
- Reconcile Azure invoices or billing statements against Cost Management data, exports, agreed rates, credits, and adjustments.
- Analyze cost by subscription, resource group, service, environment, application, owner, project, and business unit.
- Maintain reliable monthly cost reporting and explain material changes, unusual charges, and key cost drivers.
- Track Azure credit burn rate and forecast expected depletion dates using documented assumptions and scenarios.
- Support cost allocation, showback/chargeback, and data-quality improvements for tags and ownership information.
Optimization and savings realization
- Identify and quantify optimization opportunities, including rightsizing, idle or orphaned resources, shutdown schedules, storage tiers, licensing benefits, reservations, savings plans, and architecture-related cost improvements.
- Maintain an optimization pipeline with opportunity value, owner, action, approval status, implementation date, risk, and expected payback.
- Work with infrastructure, application, data, security, and service owners to validate feasibility and agree implementation actions.
- Track recommendations through implementation and verify realized savings against an agreed baseline; do not report recommendations alone as savings.
- Highlight cost-risk trade-offs so that optimization does not compromise availability, performance, security, or business continuity.
- Use Azure Advisor and other available cost-management data as inputs, while independently validating financial impact.
Forecasting, governance and reporting
- Produce monthly rolling forecasts for Azure spend and consumption using actual usage, seasonality, project demand, commitments, and expected optimization.
- Estimate new workload costs using the Azure Pricing Calculator and documented technical assumptions provided by solution owners.
- Configure or support budgets, alerts, anomaly review, tagging controls, and recurring governance routines.
- Prepare concise monthly dashboards covering actuals, forecast, variance, cost drivers, credits, commitments, optimization pipeline, realized savings, and key risks.
- Maintain auditable calculation logic, source data, assumptions, and evidence for reported savings and forecasts.
- Recommend improvements to Azure financial governance, cost ownership, and accountability.
Routine IT budget support
- Provide Azure actuals, forecast, and variance inputs to the IT budget owner.
- Support recurring budget updates or basic variance analysis when requested.
- Assist with limited non-Azure budget activities only when capacity allows and without reducing the Azure FinOps focus.
Required qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Business Administration, Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
- At least 2 years of relevant experience in cloud cost management, Azure billing, FinOps, cloud financial analysis, or a closely related role.
- Hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure Cost Management + Billing, including cost analysis, exports, budgets, alerts, and billing data.
- Demonstrated experience identifying Azure optimization opportunities and quantifying or tracking savings.
- Strong Excel skills, including PivotTables, XLOOKUP or equivalent lookup methods, complex formulas, and Power Query; Power BI is strongly preferred.
- Ability to translate technical consumption data into clear financial insights and actions for both technical and management audiences.
- Strong attention to detail, analytical reasoning, stakeholder coordination, and documentation discipline