Lead FinOps Analyst — Private Cloud (Storage & Data Economics)

Role summary

Own the economics of private cloud infrastructure—especially storage and data lifecycle costs. This role exists to surface hidden waste, challenge assumptions, and reclaim capacity safely. You’ll translate opaque infrastructure usage into unit economics leadership can act on.

Forecasts and budgets are guardrails; the real objective is eliminating unnecessary spend and deferred capex.

What you’ll do

• Cost & capacity modeling
  • Build transparent models for private cloud storage and infrastructure costs.
  • Establish unit economics (e.g., cost per TB-month, growth rate, utilization).
• Data lifecycle governance
  • Stand up data aging and retention reporting by product and customer requirement.
  • Partner with product, legal, and compliance teams to translate requirements into enforceable policies.
• Execution of efficiency initiatives
  • Identify and drive purge, tiering, and lifecycle improvements to reclaim capacity.
  • Prevent re-accumulation through operational controls and ownership clarity.
• Planning & KPIs
  • Forecast capacity needs and cost implications based on real growth patterns.
  • Track KPIs tied to reclaimed capacity, avoided purchases, and utilization improvement.
• Stakeholder leadership
  • Challenge “we need all of this data” assumptions with facts and options.
  • Work across engineering and product teams to make change stick.

What success looks like

• Leadership understands where private cloud spend goes and why.
• Stale or non-required data is being actively purged.
• Storage purchases are deferred or avoided due to reclaimed capacity.

Required experience

• Strong understanding of storage systems, retention, replication, and lifecycle management.
• Proven ability to create governance where none existed.
• Comfort operating at the intersection of engineering, compliance, and finance.

Nice to have

• SaaS environments with regulatory/compliance constraints
• Experience with storage telemetry, Prometheus, CMDBs
• Familiarity with large-scale data lifecycle tooling

What this role is NOT

• Not a storage administrator role
• Not a compliance-only reporting function
• Not a passive capacity planning position
• Not a “storage is cheap” mindset