Job Description Summary
The Associate Director, FinOps is accountable for establishing, scaling, and leading the enterprise FinOps practice across both cloud and on-premise technology estates, embedding financial accountability, cost transparency, and value optimization into how technology is consumed, designed, and governed. Acting as the senior bridge between Finance, Platform, and Application teams, the role drives cost visibility through showback and chargeback, owns spend governance, unlocks savings through commitment and optimization strategies, defines cost-aware design guidelines, and partners closely with cloud and infrastructure vendors to bring new cost-saving strategies, stronger governance, and improved cost visibility — while cultivating a durable culture of cost awareness and accountability across the organization.Job Description
Position Purpose:
The Associate Director, FinOps is accountable for establishing, scaling, and leading the enterprise FinOps practice across both cloud and on-premises technology estates, embedding financial accountability, cost transparency, and value optimization into how technology is consumed, designed, and governed. Acting as the senior bridge between Finance, Platform, and Application teams, the role drives cost visibility through show back and chargeback, owns spend governance, unlocks savings through commitment and optimization strategies, defines cost-aware design guidelines, and partners closely with cloud and infrastructure vendors to bring new cost-saving strategies, stronger governance, and improved cost visibility — while cultivating a durable culture of cost awareness and accountability across the organization.
Your Key Responsibilities:
Your responsibilities include, but not limited to
- Cost Visibility, Reporting & Transparency: Build and own enterprise cost visibility across cloud and on-premises estates, delivering accurate, timely, and decision-ready reporting to Finance, Platform, and Application teams. Design and operate show back models and define chargeback frameworks that fairly and transparently allocate technology cost to business units, products, and services. Establish FinOps KPIs, dashboards, and unit-economics metrics that connect technology spend to business value and consumption.
- Spend Governance & Financial Accountability: Define, implement, and enforce spend governance policies, budgets, thresholds, tagging standards, and approval guardrails across the technology estate. Lead budgeting, forecasting, and variance management, proactively identifying cost anomalies, drift, and untagged or unaccountable spend. Drive financial accountability by ensuring every cost has a clear owner, allocation, and justification.
- Savings Enablement & Commitment Management: Enable savings through commitment-based approaches such as reserved instances, savings plans, committed-use discounts, and enterprise agreements, balancing flexibility against discount depth. Build and manage the commitment portfolio end to end, optimizing coverage, utilization, and renewal strategy to maximize realized savings. Structure rate, discount, and commercial savings strategies in partnership with vendors and procurement.
- Optimization & Efficiency: Run continuous optimization across cloud and on-premises — rightsizing, waste elimination, idle-resource reclamation, storage tiering, and utilization improvement. Establish optimization backlogs, savings targets, and realization tracking, holding platform and application teams accountable for execution. Quantify, validate, and report realized versus potential savings to leadership with clear evidence and trends.
- Cost-Aware Design Guidelines & Architecture: Create cost-aware design guidelines, reference patterns, and architectural standards that embed efficiency from the point of design. Partner with architecture and platform teams to make cost a first-class design constraint alongside performance, resilience, and security. Review major designs and changes for cost impact before they are built, preventing avoidable spend at the source.
- On-Premises FinOps & Lifecycle Management: Extend FinOps discipline beyond cloud to the on-premises estate, covering data centers, compute, storage, networking, and software licensing. Manage infrastructure and asset lifecycle — capacity planning, refresh cycles, depreciation, decommissioning, and total cost of ownership. Drive consistent cost visibility, allocation, and governance across hybrid cloud and on-premises environments.
- Stakeholder Engagement & Cross-Functional Alignment: Act as the trusted FinOps partner to Finance, Platform teams, and Application teams, translating fluently between financial and technical perspectives. Align stakeholders around shared cost objectives, allocation models, and accountability frameworks. Influence and drive adoption of FinOps practices across decentralized engineering and business teams.
- Vendor & Partner Cost Strategy: Work closely with cloud and infrastructure vendors to bring new cost-saving strategies, pricing constructs, and emerging capabilities to the organization. Partner with vendors to improve governance, strengthen cost visibility, and unlock commercial and technical efficiency. Benchmark vendor commercial models and leverage strategic relationships to continuously improve value.
- Cost Awareness & FinOps Culture: Build and embed a culture of cost awareness and accountability across technology and business teams. Deliver enablement, training, and communication that turn engineers and stakeholders into cost-conscious decisionmakers. Champion the FinOps operating model, maturing its capabilities, processes, and tooling over time.
What you’ll bring to the role:
Essential Requirements:
- 10–12+ years of experience in FinOps, IT financial management, technology cost optimization, or cloud and infrastructure financial governance, including time in a senior or lead capacity.
- FinOps Practice Leadership: Proven track record establishing, scaling, or leading an enterprise FinOps practice across both cloud and on-premises environments.
- Cloud & On-Premises Cost Management: Deep, hands-on understanding of cost management across hyperscale cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) and on-premises data center, licensing, and infrastructure lifecycle economics.
- Commitment & Savings Strategy: Demonstrated expertise in commitment-based savings (reserved instances, savings plans, committed-use discounts), rate optimization, and realized-savings management.
- Governance, Reporting & Financial Acumen: Strong command of show back and chargeback, budgeting, forecasting, unit economics, and spend governance, with the ability to connect cost to business value.
- Stakeholder & Vendor Management: Advanced ability to partner across Finance, Platform, and Application teams and to work with cloud and infrastructure vendors to drive new cost and governance strategies.
- Influence & Cost Culture: Proven ability to build cost awareness and accountability, driving change through influence across decentralized technical and business teams.
- Bachelor’s degree in information technology, Engineering, Computer Science, Business Administration, or related discipline; master’s degree (e.g., MBA, MSc in Finance or Technology Management) strongly preferred.
- FinOps Certified Practitioner or Professional, cloud cost or cloud architecture certifications (AWS, Azure, GCP), IT asset management / ITIL certifications are a plus.
Why Sandoz?
Sandoz is the global leader in Biosimilar and Generic medicines, a segment of the healthcare industry that delivers 80% of the world’s medicines at 30% of the cost, touching the lives of more than 1 billion people across 100+ countries! While we are proud of our achievements, we have an ambition to do more so that everyone can achieve the basic human right of good health.
With investments in new development capabilities, production sites, new acquisitions, and partnerships, we have the opportunity to shape the future of Sandoz and help even more people gain access to low-cost, high-quality medicines, sustainably.
Our momentum is powered by an open, collaborative culture driven by our talented and ambitious colleagues, who, in return for applying their skills, experience an agile and collegiate environment with impactful careers, where diversity of thought is welcomed and where personal growth is supported!
Join us, help us make healthcare fairer and faster.
Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion:
We are committed to building an outstanding, inclusive work environment and diverse teams representative of the patients and communities we serve.
#Sandoz
Skills Desired
Analytical Thinking, Change Management, Influencing Skills, IT Governance, Performance Management, Stakeholder Management, Strategic PlanningSkills Required
- 10-12+ years of experience in FinOps, IT financial management, technology cost optimization, or cloud and infrastructure financial governance, including senior or lead experience
- Experience establishing, scaling, or leading an enterprise FinOps practice across cloud and on-premises environments
- Hands-on understanding of cost management across AWS, Azure, GCP, on-premises data centers, software licensing, and infrastructure lifecycle economics
- Expertise in reserved instances, savings plans, committed-use discounts, rate optimization, and realized-savings management
- Strong knowledge of showback, chargeback, budgeting, forecasting, unit economics, and spend governance
- Advanced stakeholder and vendor-management skills across Finance, Platform, Application, cloud, and infrastructure teams
- Ability to build cost awareness and accountability and drive change across decentralized technical and business teams
- Bachelor's degree in information technology, Engineering, Computer Science, Business Administration, or a related discipline
- Master's degree such as an MBA or MSc in Finance or Technology Management
- FinOps Certified Practitioner or Professional certification
- AWS, Azure, or GCP cloud cost or cloud architecture certifications
- IT asset management or ITIL certification
Sandoz Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Sandoz and has not been reviewed or approved by Sandoz.
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Healthcare Strength — Health, dental, vision, and prescription coverage are consistently described as core components across U.S. roles and materials. Feedback suggests the medical offering is broad and a standard pillar of the package.
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Retirement Support — A 401(k) plan with a company match described as generous is commonly included for U.S. roles. This savings support is positioned alongside other primary benefits as part of total rewards.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity eligibility is noted for many positions and a global all‑employee share program is being introduced from 2026. These elements add upside beyond base salary and annual bonus.
Sandoz Insights
What We Do
Sandoz is the global leader in generic and biosimilar medicines. Our Purpose is to pioneer access to medicines for patients globally. We are on a mission to drive innovation in the healthcare industry by freeing up resources sustainably and responsibly while continuing to address global health challenges such as antimicrobial resistance. We are present in more than 100 countries and our medicines serve some 500 million people every year. We have two main global businesses: Generics - divided between standard generics and complex generics - and Biosimilars.
