FinOps Analyst (AWS)

Key Responsibilities

• Cost Visibility & Reporting 

  • Analyse AWS spend across multiple accounts, identifying cost drivers and mapping them to products, portfolios, and engineering teams. 

  • Produce regular, accurate cost reports for senior management, clearly articulating budget impact, variance, and trend analysis. 

  • Maintain and improve tagging hygiene and allocation models to ensure costs are attributed correctly and consistently. 

  • Track and report the status of active savings initiatives and projects, providing a clear view of projected vs. realised savings. 

   

  AWS Cost Optimisation 

  • Lead and execute optimisation initiatives across the AWS estate, with deep practical knowledge of: 

  • EC2 and EBS rightsizing — matching instance types and storage configurations to actual workload patterns, including gp2-to-gp3 migrations and IOPS/throughput tuning. 

  • Scheduling and auto-scaling — eliminating 24/7 on-demand running for non-production workloads. 

  • Commitment-based savings — managing Reserved Instances (Standard and Convertible), Compute and EC2 Savings Plans, including coverage and utilisation tracking. 

  • Data transfer cost reduction — identifying and remediating avoidable inter-AZ, internet egress, and NAT Gateway charges. 

  • Storage and snapshot lifecycle — enforcing retention policies and tiering to reduce EBS, S3, and snapshot costs. 

  • Understand and advise on AWS commercial programmes, including MAP (Migration Acceleration Programme), PPAs (Private Pricing Agreements), and EDP (Enterprise Discount Programme) to maximise negotiated savings. 

   

  Stakeholder Enablement & FinOps Culture 

  • Act as a trusted advisor to engineering and product teams, helping them identify cost 'hot spots', understand the drivers behind their spend, and develop a sense of ownership over cloud costs. 

  • Support and coordinate a network of FinOps Champions embedded across product and portfolio areas — providing them with tooling, education, data, and frameworks to drive cost accountability locally. 

  • Produce self-service dashboards and cost reporting assets that allow teams to monitor their own spend without requiring FinOps intervention for every query. 

  • Communicate cost findings and recommendations clearly and concisely in both written and verbal formats, tailored to a non-technical or management audience where appropriate.

  
  

  Governance & Autonomy 

  • Proactively review cloud spend and independently develop proposals for cost reduction and control initiatives — not waiting to be asked. 

  • Maintain initiative trackers and savings registers, providing accurate status updates to management on in-flight projects across multiple AWS accounts and product areas. 

  • Contribute to FinOps policies, standards, and best practice documentation to scale knowledge across the organisation. 

Skillsets:

• Essential 

  • 3–6 years of hands-on FinOps, cloud cost management, or cloud operations experience, with a strong focus on AWS. 

  • Proven ability to independently investigate AWS cost drivers and produce clear, management-ready reports with business context. 

  • Deep practical knowledge of AWS cost optimisation levers: EC2 rightsizing, EBS (including gp3 IOPS/throughput tuning), scheduling, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances. 

  • Solid understanding of AWS data transfer pricing models and strategies to reduce inter-AZ, internet egress, and NAT Gateway costs. 

  • Experience managing or tracking savings initiatives across multiple AWS accounts or teams simultaneously. 

  • Familiarity with AWS native cost tooling: Cost Explorer, Cost and Usage Reports (CUR), AWS Budgets, and Trusted Advisor. 

  • Strong communication skills — able to translate technical findings into business language for a senior management audience. 

  • Demonstrated ability to work autonomously, prioritise competing demands, and deliver without close supervision. 

  
  

  Highly Desirable 

  • Experience with AWS commercial programmes: MAP, PPA, and/or EDP, including modelling commitments and tracking credit utilisation. 

  • Experience supporting or coaching engineering teams with limited cloud cost knowledge — building capability, not just delivering reports. 

  • Familiarity with third-party FinOps platforms (e.g. CloudHealth, Apptio Cloudability, AWS Cost Intelligence Dashboard). 

  • FinOps Certified Practitioner (FOCP) certification from the FinOps Foundation, or active progress towards it. 

  • Experience with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform, CloudFormation) sufficient to understand resource configurations and their cost implications. 

  • SQL or Python scripting for CUR data analysis and custom reporting.