Location: United States - Remote

Employment Type: Full-time

Team: Product Development Operations

The Lead Finops Specialist will take ownership of the recently launched Finops program, continuing to build on its initial success and traction, bringing its launch components and initiatives to a steady state of maturity and beyond.

This is a genuinely multi-faceted role, working for a global, industry-leading company, that will offer opportunities to work with individuals and teams at all levels in Finance, Engineering, Operations, Procurement, Sales and Customer Support organizations.

Our ideal candidate will have broad and deep experience leading a Finops practice, ideally with technical, project management, and finance experience, and will be equally comfortable rolling out automated instrumentation in AWS, producing financial forecasts, presenting to executives, and collaborating with engineers.

Role and Responsibilities

Leadership, process and product

· Lead the Finops program per the summary above, coordinating key contributors and partners, taking ownership of running this program end to end.

· Drive the iterative development of new processes related to cost accounting, analysis, forecast reporting, savings recommendations).

· Close gaps in the community’s understanding of cost reduction and resource optimization concepts, strategies, mechanisms, and observability.

· Drive cost efficiencies from an architectural and an operational perspective by identifying optimal resources for given workloads and feeding back recommendations into Platform and Product Engineering.

· Work with Finance to refine unit-cost metrics appropriate for the Guidewire environment.

· Develop automation to generate accessible, actionable, interactive reporting appropriate to respective target audiences, covering metrics and instrumentation across anomaly detection, RI/SP gaps and expirations, right- sizing and coverage.

· Enable teams to identify additional cost reduction and resource optimization opportunities

· Develop feedback loops/education to establish/evolve/reinforce best practices in engineering and ops with respect to system architecture standards and implementation, tagging/labeling standards where these support cost management.

· Develop and socialize a common lexicon to enable cross-functional understanding of cloud cost concepts, both for engineers to understand financial accounting (and insurance industry) terms, and for finance professionals to understand cloud computing concepts and constructs.

· Produce technical and other documentation to facilitate communication with all stakeholders, and curate a knowledge base.

Project Management

· Partner with PMO to develop a high-level program, work with technical managers/leads to prioritize backlogs and drive execution of remediations/investigations around Finops related initiatives and tasks.

· Employ project management methods, with an ability to lead small technical teams, scope Jira tickets, prioritize work efforts, facilitate meetings and ensure technical teams execute on commitments.

Organization and Culture

· Encourage transparency, collaboration and innovation across technical groups and departments

· Continue to build trust, confidence, and engagement in the program among all stakeholders across the enterprise.

· Contribute to a team environment that will have both local and remote leadership. Be happy to take on occasional high priority work outside of established business hours.

· Work remotely or based in an office, or in a hybrid model. Expect to engage in occasional commute/travel to Guidewire offices.

Experience

· Proven experience launching, evangelizing, growing, and sustaining a Finops practice within an AWS environment.

· Several years of technical program management experience, managing and delivering complex enterprise-class software projects implementing hybrid waterfall, agile, CI/CD methodologies.

· Strong experience with FinOps data and all of the AWS analytical tools: Cost Explorer, Cost and Usage Report (CUR), Cost Intelligence Dashboards (CID), and Athena.

· Strong experience with AWS resource metering concepts and methodologies including resource tagging and Kubernetes namespace labeling; able to interrogate the AWS console or CLI in order to investigate resource utilization, storage provisioning, Instance Reservations and Savings Plans.

· Experience with building data visualizations, SQL, and scripting languages of data science (R or Python) a plus

· Experience creating compelling, automated reporting for shareback/chargeback purposes (such as resource utilization, reservations coverage, cost savings, etc)

· Strong technical engineering background, preferably as a technical IC such as a systems or software engineer.

· Experience working in a FinTech and/or Paas/SaaS organizations.

· Solid understanding of financial and operations concepts, policies and process.

· Ability to negotiate with, and influence others.

· Ability to thrive in highly dynamic and ambiguous situations.

**Qualifications **

· Master’s or bachelor’s degree, preferably in technical discipline (or an Arts degree followed by a technical career)

· AWS Solutions Architect Certification preferred.

About Guidewire

Guidewire is the platform P&C insurers trust to engage, innovate, and grow efficiently.

Guidewire combines core, data, digital, analytics, and AI to deliver our platform as a cloud service. More than 400 insurers, including the largest and most complex in the world, run on Guidewire.

As a partner to our customers, we continually evolve to enable their success. We are proud of our unparalleled implementation track record with 1000+ successful projects, supported by the largest R&D team and partner ecosystem in the industry. Our Marketplace provides hundreds of add-ons that accelerate integration, localization, and innovation.

Guidewire Software, Inc. is proud to be an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. We are committed to an inclusive workplace, and believe that a diversity of perspectives, abilities, and cultures is a key to our success. Qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, citizenship, marital status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, veteran status, or disability. All offers are contingent upon passing a criminal history and other background checks where it's applicable to the position.

Disability Accommodations and Guidewire’s Appeals Process. Guidewire provides accommodations to the hiring process to create a fair opportunity for candidates with disabilities to contend for open positions. Accommodation requests should be directed to (650) 356-4940 or Accommodations@guidewire.com. If things do not go as hoped, we invite you to use our appeals process. Guidewire promises to independently review any denied accommodation and any decision not to offer you the position. The appeals process is the same in either case. Within five business days of receiving a notice of denial of an accommodation, or receiving a notice of your non-selection for a vacancy, call (650) 356-4940 or e-mail Accommodations@guidewire.com to make an appeal. Guidewire will assign a new decision-maker to review the request and/or hiring decision, who will then notify you in writing of a decision within 10 business days.