Interim Director, Cloud FinOps — Consumption Reset

The mandate

Cloud consumption exceeded the board plan by 38% while a large reserved-capacity commitment remained underused, and the FinOps director was removed after repeated allocation gaps. Engineering leaders dispute ownership of shared services, leaving Finance unable to distinguish growth cost from idle or defective consumption.

The interim should join within three weeks for a fixed eight-month assignment. The permanent director search begins after the chargeback model is accepted in month four, with a four-week transfer period before the term ends.

Handover is complete when at least 95% of spend is allocated to accountable products, verified savings reach the board target, forecast variance stays within 5% for three months, commitment coverage is optimised, and the successor runs the first monthly consumption council.

The interim may enforce tagging, stop unowned non-production workloads, execute reservations within existing treasury policy and reallocate ₹4 crore of optimisation spend. New provider commitments above ₹15 crore, production shutdown, application retirement and permanent engineering roles require CIO or committee approval.

Application modernisation, data-centre exit and customer pricing are outside scope. The role will expose their economic choices but will not own code transformation or commercial recovery.

Why this seat is open

The overrun showed that reports were descriptive but carried no accountable decisions. Platform and product teams each benefit from classifying shared spend elsewhere. A temporary FinOps leader can settle the allocation basis and install enforceable controls before permanent recruitment.

What you will own

• Define allocation rules for product, shared platform, security, data, non-production and unowned cloud consumption.
• Decide which idle, oversized or orphaned resources are removed after service ownership and production impact are verified.
• Rebuild the forecast by workload drivers, contractual commitments, unit demand and engineering change.
• Approve reservation and savings-plan actions against utilisation, concentration, break-even and exit flexibility.
• Establish engineering unit-cost scorecards with named variance explanations and decision thresholds.
• Evidence realised savings through invoice-level baselines rather than opportunity estimates or avoided future spend.
• Transfer allocation logic, commitment positions, open optimisation actions, owner disputes and council cadence to the successor.

Candidate qualifications

• Led FinOps, cloud economics or technology cost management at enterprise scale.
• Managed multi-cloud consumption exceeding ₹100 crore annually with product-level allocation.
• Delivered invoice-verified savings across rightsizing, scheduling, storage, commitments and architectural changes.
• Negotiated reservations or savings plans while preserving workload and provider flexibility.
• Established engineering accountability for unit cost without reducing FinOps to a finance reporting service.
• Holds practical knowledge of hyperscaler billing, tagging, observability and enterprise sourcing.

Non-negotiables

• Available in Bengaluru within three weeks.
• No reseller incentive or advisory relationship with the organisation's cloud providers.
• Will distinguish realised savings from estimates and avoided growth.
• Must have authority experience over live cloud consumption, not only procurement analytics.

1. 49 words maximum. Confirm availability and disclose any hyperscaler or reseller relationship.
2. 49 words maximum. Quantify invoice-verified cloud savings you delivered and the baseline used.
3. 49 words maximum. How would you allocate a shared data platform whose consumers change daily?