Director, FinOps & AI Cost Engineering (Hybrid Preferred)

Requisition Number: 2369175
Optum Tech is a global leader in health care innovation. Our teams develop cutting-edge solutions that help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. From advanced data analytics and AI to cybersecurity, we use innovative approaches to solve some of health care's most complex challenges. Your contributions here have the potential to change lives. Ready to build the next breakthrough? Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.
We are hiring a Director, FinOps & AI Cost Engineering to build that system.
This is not a traditional cloud cost management role. It is a leadership role at the intersection of engineering, architecture, finance, procurement, and AI platform operations. The person in this seat will establish the frameworks, telemetry, governance, and operating rhythms that turn technology spend into measurable business value. This leader will help UnitedHealthcare Technology understand not just what AI costs, but which AI investments create the most value, how to scale them responsibly, and how to make those economics visible to engineering leaders and executives alike.
This role will be embedded within UHC Technology's platform and engineering ecosystem, partnering closely with SRE, observability, and engineering teams to drive cost visibility and optimization.
The right person for this role combines solid FinOps and cloud economics expertise with deep technical fluency in AI workloads, modern platforms, and engineering delivery. This leader must be equally comfortable discussing token-level unit economics with engineers, commitment strategies with cloud partners, and value realization with senior leadership.
What You Will Own:
AI FinOps Strategy and Operating Model:

• Stand up and lead an AI FinOps practice spanning cloud infrastructure, on-prem infrastructure, SaaS, vendor spend, model API usage, and token-based AI workload economics
• Build and scale the FinOps capability from the ground up, establishing foundational practices, tooling, and operating rhythms where they do not exist today
• Define the operating model, governance, and decision rights for AI and tech cost accountability across products, platforms, and shared services
• Establish the standards for how AI spend is measured, attributed, reviewed, and optimized across UHC Technology

Unit Economics and Cost Transparency:

• Build the core economics framework for AI-enabled technology services, including cost per inference, cost per agent run, cost per workflow, cost per active user, and cost per business outcome where practical
• Create showback and chargeback models that give engineering and business leaders actionable cost visibility at the team, application, and workload level
• Develop dashboards, scorecards, and reporting that make cloud and AI economics understandable to both technical and executive audiences

Optimization and Value Engineering:

• Identify and drive optimization opportunities across cloud consumption, commitments, rightsizing, storage, SaaS usage, model selection, prompt design, retrieval strategies, and inference patterns
• Partner with engineering and architecture leaders early in design decisions to shape solutions for both technical performance and economic efficiency
• Partner with SRE and observability teams to connect performance, reliability, and cost signals, enabling more informed engineering and architectural decisions
• Shift the organization from reactive bill review to proactive value engineering
• Enable scalable adoption of AI and platform capabilities by embedding cost transparency and economic efficiency into engineering decisions early in the lifecycle

AI-Enabled FinOps Automation:

• Deploy AI-powered workflows and agents to automate core FinOps activities, including anomaly detection, optimization recommendations, contract analysis, tagging enforcement, and forecasting support
• Reduce manual reporting and repetitive analysis through scalable automation and agentic operating models
• Establish guardrails and controls for autonomous or semi-autonomous FinOps actions

Vendor and Commercial Management:

• Partner with Procurement, Finance, Architecture, and platform leaders on cloud, AI, and SaaS commercial strategy
• Use consumption and utilization data to support commitment planning, vendor negotiations, renewal strategy, and commercial restructuring
• Improve value realization from hyperscalers, model providers, and platform vendors through disciplined governance and measurable performance tracking

You'll be rewarded and recognized for your performance in an environment that will challenge you and give you clear direction on what it takes to succeed in your role as well as provide development for other roles you may be interested in.
Required Qualifications:

• Undergraduate degree or equivalent experience
• 10+ years of experience in FinOps, cloud economics, technology business operations, platform economics, or closely related technology leadership roles
• 5+ years of leadership experience managing cross-functional initiatives, programs, or teams in a large enterprise environment
• Demonstrated experience building a FinOps, cloud economics, or technology cost management capability at scale
• Solid understanding of public cloud cost drivers, including compute, storage, networking, commitments, reservation strategies, and utilization optimization
• Solid working knowledge of AI/ML workload economics, including model APIs, inference patterns, token-based cost drivers, GPU/accelerator usage, or comparable AI platform economics
• Experience partnering with engineering, architecture, finance, procurement, and vendor teams to influence both technical and commercial decisions
• Proven ability to create executive-ready reporting and translate technical spend patterns into business decisions
• Experience with dashboards, telemetry, and cost observability tooling that supports chargeback/showback, forecasting, and optimization

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building or deploying AI-enabled automation, agents, or copilots in a production or enterprise setting
• Experience in FinOps using data to drive recommendations to lower costs and improve efficiency
• Experience leading major cloud commitment restructures or platform modernization efforts
• Familiarity with model selection tradeoffs, prompt/inference optimization, RAG economics, and agent runtime design considerations
• Solid point of view on the future of AI cost attribution, agent ROI, and cloud-to-AI spend convergence

*All employees working remotely will be required to adhere to UnitedHealth Group's Telecommuter Policy.
Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to local labor markets, education, work experience, certifications, etc. In addition to your salary, we offer benefits such as, a comprehensive benefits package, incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase and 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). No matter where or when you begin a career with us, you'll find a far-reaching choice of benefits and incentives. The salary for this role will range from $134,600 to $230,800 annually based on full-time employment. We comply with all minimum wage laws as applicable.
At UnitedHealth Group, our mission is to help people live healthier lives and make the health system work better for everyone. We believe everyone-of every race, gender, sexuality, age, location and income-deserves the opportunity to live their healthiest life. Today, however, there are still far too many barriers to good health which are disproportionately experienced by people of color, historically marginalized groups and those with lower incomes. We are committed to mitigating our impact on the environment and enabling and delivering equitable care that addresses health disparities and improves health outcomes - an enterprise priority reflected in our mission.
UnitedHealth Group is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer under applicable law and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, national origin, religion, age, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by local, state, or federal laws, rules, or regulations.
UnitedHealth Group is a drug - free workplace. Candidates are required to pass a drug test before beginning employment.
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