Peraton is seeking a Cloud FinOps Analyst to manage cloud financial operations for a large, multi-tenant AWS environment spanning both commercial and GovCloud accounts. This role is responsible for improving cost visibility, accountability, and optimization across the organization.
The analyst will turn cloud usage and spending data into actionable insights for engineering and business teams, identifying opportunities to reduce costs while maintaining system performance, reliability, and availability. The FinOps Analyst will also provide consolidated cloud cost reporting and forecasting to leadership, finance, and engineering teams. Responsibilities include tracking monthly actuals, analyzing spending trends, managing chargeback and cost allocation, and developing fiscal-year cost projections.
This role works closely with finance, engineering, platform, and program teams to establish consistent FinOps practices and integrate cost management into the software development lifecycle. The goal is to make cloud costs transparent, predictable, and actionable so teams can make informed decisions about how they build and operate AWS services.
Location: Remote
Shift Schedule: 8am – 5pm Eastern Standard Time (EST)
What you will do:
Cost Optimization and Resource Right-Sizing
- Analyze utilization data from AWS Cost Explorer, Compute Optimizer, Trusted Advisor, and CloudWatch to identify right-sizing opportunities across EC2, RDS, EBS, ELB, and container workloads.
- Develop prioritized right-sizing recommendations with quantified savings, and partner with engineering owners to implement and validate those recommendations rather than simply delivering a report.
- Identify idle, orphaned, and overprovisioned resources, and coordinate recurring remediation with the appropriate engineering and platform teams.
- Manage Reserved Instance and Savings Plan strategy, including coverage analysis, purchase recommendations, utilization monitoring, and lifecycle management.
- Reduce storage costs through S3 lifecycle policies, appropriate EBS volume types, intelligent tiering, and effective snapshot management.
- Establish a continuous optimization process that incorporates cost efficiency into day-to-day cloud operations rather than addressing it only after costs increase.
Consolidated Cost Reporting and Analysis
- Build and maintain consolidated monthly cost reports covering AWS spend, usage trends, unit economics, and optimization opportunities across accounts, business units, and programs.
- Design and manage chargeback and showback models that allocate cloud costs to the appropriate business units with clear, transparent, and defensible cost attribution.
- Implement and enforce a consistent cost-allocation tagging strategy across the AWS estate, and drive remediation of untagged or incorrectly tagged resources.
- Develop executive dashboards and program-level scorecards using AWS Cost and Usage Reports to provide clear visibility into cloud spending and performance.
- Perform root-cause analysis on cost anomalies and unexpected spending variances, and communicate findings and recommended actions clearly to both finance and engineering audiences.
- Support cost governance and reporting across a multi-account AWS Organizations environment spanning commercial and GovCloud accounts under consolidated billing.
Forecasting and Budget Management
- Develop fiscal-year cloud spend projections and monthly burn-rate views, and update forecasts as consumption, program scope, and pricing change.
- Model the expected cost impact of architectural changes, migrations, and new workload onboarding before financial or engineering commitments are made.
- Monitor budget utilization against plan, identify variances early, and recommend corrective actions to keep programs on track.
- Support annual budgeting, quarterly reforecasts, and business-case development for cloud investments.
- Configure and manage AWS Budgets and Cost Anomaly Detection thresholds, including the associated alerting, investigation, and response processes.
Governance, Collaboration, and FinOps Practice
- Participate in cloud architecture reviews and provide cost estimates and financial guidance so teams understand the financial impact of design decisions before implementation.
- Ensure compliance with financial policies, cloud governance frameworks, and organizational cost controls, including FedRAMP-aligned account and billing boundaries.
- Partner with finance, IT, engineering, and program teams to align cloud financial strategy with organizational objectives and establish shared accountability for cloud spend.
- Advance FinOps maturity across the organization through training, playbooks, standardized processes, and recurring cost-management reviews.
- Automate recurring cost analysis, reporting, and tag-hygiene activities using Python or SQL to reduce manual effort and improve the scalability and consistency of FinOps operations.
