Senior FinOps Specialist GCP

Role: Senior FinOps Specialist (GCP).

Location: Bristol (Hybrid: 3 days in-office).

Salary: Up to £72,000 + 10% Bonus + Benefits

Why This Job Matters:
Our organization is rapidly transitioning to the Public Cloud, requiring a fundamental shift in how we perceive and manage infrastructure costs. The Pay-As-You-Go model of the cloud offers immense flexibility but demands vigilant financial oversight to avoid cost overruns. As part of the Cloud Business Office team's FinOps squad, you'll work with engineering teams and other stakeholders to maximize the economic potential of our cloud usage through effective financial management. Your role will involve leveraging both financial and technical skills to drive IT transformation, optimizing our cloud usage to deliver maximum value.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Stakeholder Management: Maintain critical relationships with engineers, finance partners, FinOps champions, the Cloud CoE FinOps squad, and Google.
• Service Analysis: Stay current with Google's latest, cost-effective services, assess their applicability, and promote their use among engineers.
• FinOps Promotion: Advocate for a FinOps mindset across all cloud-using teams, regardless of the cloud provider (Google, AWS, Azure).
• Spend Monitoring: Continuously monitor our GCP spend, work with engineers to implement optimization opportunities, and purchase appropriate rate optimization products.
• Reporting: Build and maintain dashboards and reports for key public cloud stakeholders.
• Financial Planning: Develop plans, budgets, forecasts, and variance analyses for public cloud consumption.
• Financial Integration: Link cloud activity to financial processes, providing variance analyses during month-end reporting.
• Chargeback Processes: Ensure chargeback and showback processes are operational.
• Waste Management: Establish policies to detect and eliminate usage waste.
• Process Improvement: Enhance front door and in-life processes to ensure comprehensive cost transparency, optimization, and financial accountability.
• Accounting Coordination: Work with finance teams to apply correct accounting practices, such as capitalizing test/dev activity and booking accruals during financial close.

Skills and Experience Required:

• Scripting and Automation: Experience with Python, SQL, and Terraform for automated cost optimization and policy implementation.
• Cloud Cost Analysis: Proficiency in building and managing cost analysis and visualizations using tools like Looker, Qlik, MS Excel, Tableau, or similar.
• Data Visualization: Skilled in creating actionable, concise, and presentable data visualizations.
• Technical Proficiency: Proficient in Git, Cloud Shell, and BigQuery.
• FinOps Knowledge: Understanding of GCP Cloud fundamentals in FinOps for budget management, spend monitoring, purchasing commitments, and cost optimization.

Desired Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience with SQL data queries.
• Proficiency in ETL pipeline setup and development.
• Experience managing and deploying GCP services, including Cloud Functions, Cloud SQL, Compute Engine, Vertex AI, Cloud Spanner, GKE, GCS, DataFlow, Composer, pub/sub, BigQuery, VPC, and Subnets (both manual provisioning in GCP Console and using Terraform).
• Certification as a FinOps Foundation Practitioner is a plus.
• Google Cloud certification (fundamentals or higher) is highly preferred.

Join us to make a significant impact by ensuring our cloud infrastructure is both cost-effective and high-performing, driving forward our mission of connected mobility for all. Apply now to be our Google Cloud FinOps Specialist!