Expert Solution Design - FinOps Cloud Financial Analyst

at  Canadian National Railway

At CN, we work together to move our company—and North America—forward. Be part of our Information & Technology (I&T) team, a critical piece of the engine that keeps us in motion. From enterprise architecture to operational technology, our teams use the agile methodology to automate and digitize our railroad ensuring our operations run optimally and safely and our employees can focus on value-added tasks. You will be able to develop your skills and career in our close-knit, safety-focused culture working together as ONE TEAM. The careers we offer are meaningful because the work we do matters. Join us!

JOB SUMMARY

The FinOps team works closely with CN project and service leaders whose infrastructure is hosted on public cloud platforms (GCP and Azure). The team’s mission is to enable the organization to generate the maximum business value out of its public cloud investments. As a FinOps Analyst, you’ll be responsible for planning, tracking, and optimizing our public cloud spend. You will take part in cost optimization, capacity planning, forecasting and budgeting. You will also be responsible to lead cultural change by promoting cloud cost management best practices across the organization.

RELEVANT TRAINING AND EXPERIENCE

• A Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent experience in Computer Information Systems, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field
• Experience in Accounting, Financial management, Statistics, or a related field
• 3+ years of experience in IT with at least 4 years in a 1,000+ server environment
• Previous experience working in company that went through cultural change from on-premises to off-premises
• Exposure to public cloud billing and services

SKILLS & KNOWLEDGE

As this position requires a mix of technical and financial, we are looking for people who would be motivated to learn and complement their existing skills with new ones including:

• Experience working with one of the leading cloud platforms such as Azure, Google Cloud or AWS
• Experience in budget management or IT financial planning
• Experience in capacity planning
• Prior knowledge of IT infrastructure (i.e. networking, compute, storage layers) a significant plus
• Experience in data analysis
• Cloudability experience not required, but a significant plus
• Ability to effectively collaborate across organizational boundaries
• Have good interpersonal communication skills and oral and written comprehension of English and French.
• Strong written and oral communication skills, and experience presenting formally or informally

• Manage cloud spend and identify cost optimization opportunities.
• Work closely with Finance on budgets, forecasts, and cost allocation reports.
• Create operational metrics to track cost and usage and provide visibility to various stakeholders.
• Provide expert advice and consulting on cloud financial management.
• Configure and manage cloud cost optimization tools.
• Create and maintain internal documentation on FinOps and cost optimization processes.
• Provide waste reduction, rightsizing and autoscaling recommendations to project and service teams so they can optimize cloud usage.
• Promote FinOps best practices to CN project and service teams.
• Analyze usage and provide optimization plans.
• Lead the rate optimization activities using reserved instances and committed use discounts.
• Take part in project design financial plan (including financial ruling of OpEx/CapEx) in order to optimize cloud usage on implementation.
• Support service managers and procurement with contracts renewal and negotiations.
• Provide IT management with cost reports and KPIs.
• Assist internal customers to estimate their cloud usage.