Role Overview
The Staff/Lead Cloud Engineer - Azure FinOps is the FinOps subject-matter expert embedded with Product and Engineering. You own how Azure billing actually works across every commercial construct Microsoft sells through — and how cost gets allocated, recovered, and reduced on top of it.
Azure billing is not one system. An EA enrollment, an MCA billing account, a CSP/partner-managed tenant, and an MSP-resold estate expose different hierarchies, data shapes, and discount mechanics. Someone who has only rightsized VMs has not done this job. We need someone who has stood inside these billing models, reconciled them against invoices, and built showback and chargeback a finance team accepted.
Key Responsibilities
Azure Billing and Commercial Models (Primary)
- Own the product's model of Azure billing across EA, MCA, CSP/Partner-led, and MSP-resold estates — including where each behaves differently and what breaks when you assume they don't
- Define how the platform represents the billing hierarchy: EA enrollment → departments → accounts, and MCA billing account → billing profiles → invoice sections → subscriptions
- Specify handling for discounts, credits, refunds, and adjustments — negotiated pricing, partner earned credit, promotional and sponsorship credits, commitment drawdown, service credits, mid-cycle corrections
- Reconcile usage data against invoices; define product behavior when they disagree, and where amortized, actual, and effective cost must be reported separately
- Map billing roles (Enterprise Admin, Billing Profile Owner/Contributor, Invoice Section Reader, Partner Center roles) to what the product can see at each tier
Allocation, Showback, Chargeback, and Budgets
- Design allocation models that survive real estates — tag, subscription, and management-group driven — with a defensible method for shared and unallocatable cost
- Define showback and chargeback as separate product behaviors with different accuracy and auditability bars; specify markup and margin handling for MSP/CSP resale
- Own reservation and Savings Plan benefit attribution and amortization presentation
- Own budget design across all Azure scopes, with actual vs. forecasted alerts, action groups, and automated response; set a real signal-to-noise bar for anomaly detection
Cost Optimization
- Define and validate optimization recommendations — rightsizing, idle and orphaned resources, disk and snapshot cleanup, SKU upgrades, storage tiering, Log Analytics ingestion, egress
- Own commitment strategy: RI and Savings Plan coverage, utilization, breakeven, scope choice, exchange and refund rules, Azure Hybrid Benefit
- Set the accuracy bar for every savings claim the product makes — the calculation, the assumptions, and what makes it defensible to a CFO
Product Partnership and Engineering
- Act as the technical authority on Azure cost and billing behavior for PM and engineering; turn Cost Management, Consumption, Billing, Partner Center, and Retail Prices API behavior into implementable requirements
- Pressure-test proposed features against how practitioners work; validate shipped capability against live estates and report gaps honestly
- Automate billing data collection, normalization, and reconciliation; build reference environments across billing models
- Produce enablement material for Sales, CS, and Support; support high-stakes customer conversations; mentor engineers and PMs on Azure cost fundamentals
Desired Skills and Requirements
Must Have
- Hands-on experience across at least three of: EA, MCA, CSP/Partner-led, MSP-resold billing — with a clear account of how they differ
- Demonstrated understanding of billing accounts, billing profiles, invoice sections, and billing groups, and how EA departments/accounts differ from the MCA model
- Practical experience with discounts, credits, refunds, and adjustments — and how each surfaces, or fails to surface, in usage data
- Built or operated a showback and chargeback model that a finance function accepted
- Hands-on cost allocation design, including shared-cost treatment and commitment benefit attribution
- Budgets and alerts at multiple Azure scopes, including forecasted-spend alerts and automated response
- Ability to reconcile usage data against an invoice and explain a variance
- Ownership of Azure cost outcomes on estates of $500K+ annual spend across multiple subscriptions and regions, with documented 20%+ reductio — including how savings were measured
- Deep knowledge of Azure commercial mechanics: RIs, Savings Plans, Azure Hybrid Benefit, Dev/Test pricing, spot, Azure Plan
- Fluency with Azure Cost Management, cost exports, and the Consumption, Billing, and Retail Prices APIs
- Strong grasp of resource-level cost drivers — compute families, disk tiers, storage tiers and lifecycle, egress, Log Analytics retention, PaaS SKUs
- Azure Policy, RBAC, and management groups as they apply to cost control; billing roles understood as distinct from resource RBAC
- PowerShell and Azure CLI; Python or equivalent for analysis; Terraform or Bicep; ability to query large billing datasets (SQL, KQL, or pandas)
- Clear written communication — can explain a recommendation to an engineer and its financial impact to a finance stakeholder
Preferred Skills
- FinOps Foundation certification; familiarity with the FOCUS billing-data specification
- Prior Azure MSP, CSP/Partner Center reseller, or enterprise CCoE experience
- Third-party cost platforms — CloudHealth, Apptio Cloudability, Finout, Vantage
- Built or shaped a cloud cost product, internal cost platform, or billing reporting system
- Azure Lighthouse and multi-tenant delegated management
- Marketplace and third-party billing, Support plan cost, non-Microsoft charges on an Azure invoice
- AI/ML cost management — Azure OpenAI token economics, GPU capacity planning, inference cost
- AWS or GCP billing models for multi-cloud context; Azure Arc, Stack HCI, or hybrid cost scenarios
Experience
- 8–12 years in cloud infrastructure or operations, with an Azure specialty
- 4–5 years with FinOps, cloud billing, or cloud cost management as a primary responsibility
- Working alongside product or engineering teams as a domain expert is a strong plus
Education
- Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Finance, or a related field — or equivalent demonstrated experience
