Job DescriptionThe Impact you will have in this role:The
FinOps Practitioner - Data Cloud FinOps is responsible for optimizing, governing, and managing the financial performance of cloud-based data platforms and services. This role combines cloud financial management, data engineering knowledge, financial analysis, and operational governance to ensure that data infrastructure delivers maximum business value at an optimized cost.
The practitioner partners with Finance, Cloud Engineering, Data Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, Procurement, and business stakeholders to establish cost transparency, allocate spending to business units and data products, optimize consumption, and embed FinOps principles into the data platform lifecycle.
The role focuses on cloud data services such as data warehouses, data lakes, lakehouses, data integration pipelines, streaming platforms, analytics environments, and AI/ML workloads across data cloud platforms such as Snowflake, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Databricks, and other cloud data ecosystems.
Your Primary Responsibilities: - Monitor and analyze cloud data platform spending across services, environments, business units, projects, and data products.
- Develop dashboards and reports to track data cloud expenditure, consumption trends, unit costs, and budget utilization.
- Build cost allocation and chargeback/showback models for data platforms and shared data services.
- Identify cost anomalies, unexpected consumption spikes, and spending trends, and coordinate corrective actions.
- Reconcile cloud provider invoices and platform usage reports with internal financial records.
- Analyze consumption patterns across data warehouses, lakehouses, ETL/ELT pipelines, streaming workloads, and analytical queries.
- Identify optimization opportunities related to compute sizing, cluster utilization, workload scheduling, autoscaling, and resource concurrency.
- Optimize query performance and workload design in collaboration with data engineering teams to reduce processing costs.
- Evaluate workload placement and platform choices based on performance, reliability, scalability, and total cost of ownership.
- Assess the financial impact of architectural decisions, including real-time versus batch processing and cloud-native versus managed data services.
- Develop and maintain budgets and forecasts for cloud data platforms and associated services.
- Analyze actual spending against budgets, forecasts, business demand, and historical consumption.
- Build predictive cost models based on data growth, workload volumes, user adoption, and business initiatives.
- Support financial planning for new data products, platform migrations, analytics initiatives, and AI workloads.
- Prepare financial variance analysis and communicate cost drivers, risks, and corrective actions to leadership.
- Implement FinOps policies, controls, standards, and operating procedures for data cloud services.
- Establish ownership for data platform costs across engineering teams, product owners, and business stakeholders.
- Establish governance for budget thresholds, anomaly alerts, cost optimization actions, and escalation procedures.
- Develop standardized KPIs and maturity assessments to measure the effectiveness of data cloud FinOps.
- Define and monitor unit-cost metrics relevant to data services.
- Automate cost reporting, anomaly detection, budget monitoring, and optimization recommendations.
- Partner with platform engineering teams to introduce cost controls and guardrails into CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code pipelines.
Qualifications: - Minimum of 8 years of related experience
- Bachelor's degree preferred or equivalent experience
Talents Needed for Success: - 5-8 years of experience in data cloud cost management, data cloud operations or data cloud engineering, ideally in financial services or a regulated industry.
- Deep working knowledge of Snowflake billing, pricing models, and optimization levers is a key requirement. Data platforms Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, Microsoft Fabric, Synapse, or similar
- Experience managing multi-cloud cost reporting and governance frameworks.
Strong understanding of FinOps principles, budgeting, forecasting, and cloud cost transparency practices. - Advanced Excel and data visualization skills (e.g., Power BI, Tableau, or QuickSight).
Excellent communication and collaborator management skills with both technical and finance audiences. - FinOps Certified Practitioner or FinOps Certified Professional credential.
- Familiarity with ITIL, Cloud Governance.
- Experience with data platforms and Snowflake usage optimization.
- Proficiency in scripting or SQL for custom cost analytics and automation.
- Strategic and analytical problem solver with attention to detail
- Strong financial literacy and business insight
- Ability to influence across engineering and finance teams
- Proactive attitude for continuous improvement and innovation
- Strong leadership and collaborator communication
The salary range is indicative for roles at the same level within DTCC across all US locations. Actual salary is determined based on the role, location, individual experience, skills, and other considerations.
About the TeamServes as a dedicated technology resource for advancing DTCC's business opportunities and providing industry thought leadership for leveraging new technology. The goal of this new department is to partner internally with IT, our business and regulatory divisions and externally with clients, regulators, and fintech vendors, to help build new platforms and business models to advance DTCC's mission to support the financial markets.
