Program Manager-FinOps
Our Company:
We care about helping people. Our purpose is to provide help and inspire confidence in our clients and communities everywhere. Our associates feel a sense of belonging in an inclusive place with an amazing history and a sharp focus on our future. Our connected culture is who we are and how we work together to achieve our strategies, accelerate our transformation, and achieve extraordinary results. It’s an exciting time to be a part of H&R Block!
What you'll do...:
As Program Manager for Finops team, you will own Finops Spend Management, drive Cost Transparency and Accountability, and more.
Day to day, you'll...
- Own Finops Spend Management:
- Take ownership of a centralized FinOps Platform with the goal of continuous improvement.
- Evaluate, build, and deploy cloud analytics tools to meet H&R Block's specific needs, including writing custom queries, building dashboards, and developing sophisticated pre- and post-discount analysis.
- Partner with Teams to provide Budgets for Services.
- Establish cost governance around our SaaS services (i.e. Datadog, ServiceNow).
- Drive Cost Transparency and Accountability:
- Implement robust mapping strategies and engineer detailed cost reports and interactive dashboards to provide granular insights into cloud spend by project, team, and service.
- Work with Finance and tooling teams to develop consistent reporting for product and engineering teams, establishing clear ownership for cloud costs.
- Support efforts to attribute shared costs to the respective teams driving the spend.
- Identify and Implement Cost-Saving Opportunities:
- Lead regular deep dive on cost optimization reviews, focusing on rightsizing, idle resource cleanup, and waste elimination across all cloud providers.
- Proactively manage Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs) to ensure optimal utilization and cost efficiency.
- Support planning for capacity for workloads and failover scenarios.
- Improve and expand cost allocation and chargeback/show-back models.
- Improve Cloud Forecasting & Budgeting:
- Own and refine the annual cloud spend forecasting and budgeting process to more robust forecasts incorporating organic and inorganic signals.
- Serve as the SME for Finance and Engineering leaders on forecasting, explaining variances, and highlighting optimization opportunities.
- Facilitate out-of-budget requests and budget transfers between teams.
- Provide Strategic Support and Execution:
- Stay informed of H&R Block's company goals that impact public cloud planning, proposing, and supporting strategic solutions.
- Establish centralized strategic discussions and plan formation related to cloud costing, service impacts, and buildouts.
- Act as the subject matter expert (SME) on cloud billing, vendor pricing models, and contracts.
- Collaborate Cross-Functionally:
- Work closely with Finance, Engineering, Capacity, and Procurement teams to embed FinOps principles and culture across the organization.
- Create what-if models and simulate cost impact of architectural or usage changes.
- A bachelor’s degree in finance, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; MBA or advanced degree a plus.
- Proven 5–8 years of experience in a Cloud FinOps, Cloud Cost Management, or similar technical role, preferably in a large-scale, multi-cloud environment (Azure preferred).
- Deep understanding of cloud cost models, pricing strategies, and optimization techniques (e.g., RIs, SPs, rightsizing, spot instances)
- Strong analytical skills with the ability to gather, analyze, and interpret complex financial and cloud usage data.
- Deep hands-on expertise (beyond configuration) with cloud cost management tools and platforms, including API interaction, data modeling, and custom visualization development.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate effectively with diverse stakeholders (finance, engineering, leadership).
- A proactive and ownership-driven mindset, comfortable leading initiatives and driving change in a dynamic environment.
- Ability to balance short-term cost savings with long-term strategic cloud objectives.